Prescience of the Sea-Warding Beast

MICHAELMAS 2005 (1)

Sept. 21, 2005

Again in the Gulf a storm wheels
widdershins to You, salt god,
archangel, psalm of blue futurity:
Again the fretful coast boards up
amid the klaxon throats of cable news,
maxing every drop of badness
from our uddered greed for it.
Yours is an unquiet bane grown
baleful in our neglect—not even
the richest country on earth can
bribe or seduce You from
Your rounds. I scarce have
tongue enough to carve Your
backward symmetry, that awful
whirl reversing You deign to
dervish in Your wake. With winds
at 165 two days from shrieking
land, I hold You equidistant
to that spring in which You
birthed all buds ashore, each
leaf a mewl of pale proximity
now wild greenblack infinity.
Suffice to praise You here
in two hundred words or less
then race to batten all they still hold dear.

***

Sea wards: realm of divine madness: holy salt sepulchre pregnant with Thou: Brine baptism, awakening the next son on every shore: So I read these days from pages bound in that glance, torrentially sea-warding: Am I ready thus to begin?

***


As in the sea hast thou lived in solitude, and it has borne thee up.
Alas, wilt thou now go ashore? Alas, wilt thou again drag thy body thyself?

Zarathustra answered, “I love mankind.”

-- Anchorite to Z., Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

***

The hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.

The creators form the progressive element in a community, but at the same time they are the conservatives who link back to the origins ... The depth of the unconscious layer from which the new springs, and the intensity with which this layer seizes upon the individual, are the real criteria of this summons by the voice, and not the ideology of the conscious mind.

-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

***

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance: but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inur’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly shake in our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?

(Ghost beckons Hamlet)

-- Shakespeare Hamlet I, iv

***

Shakespeare ferrying forth those most original gouts of the spermatic Work, jets of icy blue spasm from the blow-holes of his heroes at the glorious rise and crest and glimmer and smash all the way back down to doom. We know it, see it, read that original meld of world and word leaping from the page at us. Thus Keats writes in a letter to John Reynolds in Oct. 1818,

***

I’ll tell you what -- On the 23d was Shakespeare born ... Whenever you say write a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you; which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same Play forty times -- for instance, the following from The Tempest, never struck me so forcibly as at present:

“...Urchins
Shall, for that vast of Night, that they may work,
All exercise on thee--”

How can I help bringing your mind to the Line --

“In the dark backward and abysm of time--” ...

***

Their work , his work, is our work -- that’s what the energies told my father at Iona in 1976, said Thor, guardian of the North wind, said Oran, up from the footers of his ghastly myth still harrowing the sacred isles. My father had spend the night on Columba’s grave -- that is one of the traditions for all penitential visitors--re-visiting Columba’s backward glance, putting himself in the shoes of his Maker, thus back down to the great Makers ... And some day later, when he was walking towared the north end of the island, after he laid down and fell asleep in the hazy bluster of an afternoon in June, then he dreamed of all of the old stones which had once lined the island (360 of them, long tossed into the sea by Christian devouts), they came toward him, ghastly in tattered robes, mooning, ululating, calling to him, closing in on him til he woke ... And then fell back asleep, dreaming of encountering a massive Presence on the Road of Dreams that heads from the shore up to Releig Odhran, a huge brawny terribly ugly visage who was Thor, guardian of the North Wind, whom my father’s heart burst for in a love deeper than his Christianity, changing utterly his future courses. He brought back those energies from Iona, you know, they are votived in the Glen of the Temple, they said to him your work is our work and our work is your work, strange utterance, antithetical to the words Columba buried over in 563 AD -- “The way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” -- Contrarian Oran in the ears of St. Columba, what changed over the aon which ended with my father? Or has the Otherworldly labor changed at all, if we are willing to go down, look back, welcome what we see, and get to work?

***


All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnight, wants graves, wants the consolation of graveside tears, wants gilded sunsets ... Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, deep, deep eternity.

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra

***

In the collective as in the individual the patriarchal world of culture, with its primacy of consciousness, forms only a segment of the whole. The positive forces of the collective unconscious which have been excluded struggle for expression in the creative person and flow through him into the community. Partly they are “old” forces, shut out through the overdifferentiation of culture, partly new and untried forces which are destined to shape the face of the future.

Both functions help to keep culture “in balance” by ensuring that it does not stray from its roots, or, on the other hand, ossify through conservatism.

-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness


***

So what happens when one strays to sea, and stares too deeply in it? Two visions:

SEA FOREST

May 2003

Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.

-- Tennessee Williams

Suddenly as he peered down
and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living
spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity
rising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed
two long crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth, floating up
From the undiscoverable bottom.

-- Melville, Moby Dick

Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.

***

And from the chapter “Castaway” in Moby Dick:


Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to \ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green, and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up,not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.

((then, after Pip is tossed from a whale-boat for the second time and left behind))

... Now, in calm weather, to swim the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is terrible. The intense concentration of the self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?

... By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the ship like an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried him down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the warped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes, and the miserman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, is absurd and frantic, and weal or woe, feels them uncomprisied, indifferent as his God.

Feasting Michaelmas

The vigil of Rita now moves into consummation, feral whorl battening on the soft white belly of the Texas-Louisiana border with 120 mph winds and the deluge of storm surge and rains. Second maelstrom loosed into to the Gulf this season, odd how early this week I dreamt of two killer whales ravening inside the Gulf; and what of that dream’s lysis, where containment of Their feral badness seemed critical, some levee at the Straits of Florida breeched by their menace, and the two blue turbines of death leaped over and into the Atlantic, into a colder deeper vaster killing ground. In the dream’s penultimate compressions (only death assembles more in fatal coagulation), Katrina and Rita are also Columba and Oran, the two dread faces I’ve been writing at length about during the week; they are wife and anima; they are water and wind; they are fang and fin; song and story; Ariel and Caliban, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of every artistic shimmy round Ariadne’s dancing floor. But mostly they are two killer whales wild in their red joy and wanderlust, sprinting up into the heartland like loosed sperm of the Ravager, ferrying an awfulness in Their wake which totters a White House, drives gas prices up up and up, makes conversation in this house God graces at His will worried and wary, sensing sea-changes, tidal surgings of Bad News, difficult times to come.


***

Creation is always an individual achievement, for every creative work or deed is something new that was not there before, unique and not to be repeated. Thus the anima component of the personality is connected with the “voice” which expresses the creative element in the individual, contrasted with the conventionality of the father, of the collective, of conscience. The anima prophetess and priestess is the archetype of the soul which conceives the Logos, the “spermatic word” of god. She is the inspirer and the inspired, the Virgin Sophia who conceives by the Holy Ghost, and the Virgin Mother who brings forth the Logos spirit-son.

-- Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness


***

So the backward, seaward glance is erotic, fuelled by longing to merge once again in Thalassa, though whom we greet rising in those waters is of the father-dragon, the dread Logos whose word I must somehow welcome and leash and bury and re-name. Easy, for a god. It helps to be freed of selfish cumbrance: to bind Lucifer in the chains of Michael and let that power-shadow fall, league by sad slow league, all the way down to uteral doom, where he serves best. This is Michaelmas, the Christian feast of the archangel Micheal, much revered throughout the Hebrides.; the feast of the archangel has origins is Manannan, whose origin is Lir, father-dragon whose balls are the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Fiona Macleod once traced the ancestry:

The “Iollach Mhicheil” — the triumphal song of Michael — is quite as much pagan as Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the most interesting and convincing instances of the transmutation of a personal symbol. St. Michael is on the surface a saint of extraordinary powers and the patron of the shores and the shore-folk; deeper, he is an angel, who is upon the sea what the angelical saint, St. George, is upon the land: deeper, he is a blending of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon: deeper, he is himself and ancient Celtic god: deeper, he is no other than Manannan, the god of ocean and all waters, in the Gaelic pantheon: as, once more, Manannan himself is dimly revealed to us as still more ancient, more primitive, and even as supreme in remote godhead, the Father of an immortal Clan”

-- Iona

***

To amplify --

Who is Michael?

- St. Michael’s feast day is 9/23. The Eve of St. Michael was one of the most popular festivals in the Catholic isles, with every barn turned into a dancing place or a place of merrymaking, where lovers could meet and give betrothal gifts. On this day the Michaelmas lamb is sacrificed, perhaps a survival of the earlier rites of human sacrifice.

- St. Michael is extremely old in the Catholic calendar; he is the only angel canonized before this century (approx. 7th century)

- His name means “God Heals” In the eastern church he is seen as a guardian of the sick, warding off disease and death with his sword.

- He is the leader of the heavenly host and the one who bound Satan and cast him into the deep. St. Michael is the protector of Christians in general and soldiers in particular. His sword of light cannot be defeated.

- Many churches dedicated to him built on high places (Mt. Saint-Michel in France, St. Michael’s Mount in Britain, etc). An association with heavenly heights, but also with the old fairy-mounds — a Celtic/Christian Lord of Souls who guides the dead to the otherworld. Thus the reference in the old spiritual, “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” as a prayer for passage out of this world to the sweet apple-island of immortality.

***

WHO IS MANANNAN?

- Mannann Mac Lir is Son of Lir, the Sea

- Lord of the joyous otherworld which lies across or beneath the sea.

- The sea is a flowery plain to him; the waves his steeds. “For the space of nine waves he would be submerged in the sea, but would rise on the crest of the tenth without wetting his chest or breast.”

- His boat is called Wave Sweeper, travelling equally on sea and land.

- He is the best of pilots.

- Caused favorable weather and good crops.

- Guardian of Irishmen in foreign parts.

- Ruler of the autumn equinox, now celebrated as Michaelmas (9/23)

- Able to transform himself at will, much as Curoi mac Daire the king of Caer Sidi. His magic cape makes him invisible at will.

- His wife is Fand, the most beautiful of the Sidhe (the fairy-folk, Tuatha de Danaan). Waves are also referred to as “the locks of Manannan’s wife.” When Manannan abandons her she takes up with the Irish hero Cuchulainn. Fand and the mortal Emer fight over the hero; Manannan repents and asks for Fand back. He passes a cloak between Cuchulainn and Fand so they will never meet again.

- Entertains all who come to him with an inexhaustible meal: His immortal ale preserves against disease and old age, his immortal pigs are killed and eaten one day and live the next, his cup breaks if a lie is spoken.

- Has a silver bough of golden apples that, when shaken, produce such sweet music that the wounded, sick and sorrowful forget their pains and are lulled to sweet sleep.

- The wearers of his armor and sword are invulnerable. His sword “The Retaliator” never fails to slay, and he has two other swords named “Great Fury” and “Little Fury.” His 2 spears are called Yellow Shaft and Red Javelin. On his helmet shines 2 magic jewels bright as the sun.

***

My backward glance at Michaelmas goes back through my history into the mysteries of Michael and Manannan, down their paternal coil into the heart of the sea. (Remember, an orca-rider mounts my father’s primal bardic coat of arms, the very mythologem of song--three drinking horns crested by the dolphin rider; the motto is Not by Providence but Victory, every artist’s exultant mass upon the back of the whale.) May sights harrow, fructify, sing:

***

MICHAELMAS 2005 (2)


My every sense rejoices in the dark
soak of this early hour, salt-seeming
and moon-milky: Amniotics
bathe the garden, our cat in the window,
this pen in hand. Your faintest surf
washes through what crickets chirr
this late in summer, faint, fading,
divine. Far to the west Hurricane
Rita maels round toward a coast
which will hurt us all but good.
Will we have enough gas to drive
to work come Monday? Can the
richest country on earth afford
to keep borrowing from its future
to pay for hubris? Surely He who
drenches me in this noctal womb
has alms to calm His angst, some
fitting sacrifice to bury in this chair
that bones resolve what aims dissolve.
Though the rains have stopped here
at last, it doesn’t mean that angels
aren’t still falling beyond all measure
known to heaven. It doesn’t mean that
stillness is not an arm tensed at its
rearmost degree and is one word
from Him from hurling the hammer
which shatters us for good. I would
have every tunny and wave of Your
first leagues, blue master: but You
can keep that low abysmal hall
the soak cathedrals with a roar.
Baptismal of oceans, wake me to shores
that don’t hinge on dooms, like doors.


MANANNAN AND THE
WOMAN OF THE SOUTH

Manannan comes to Iona with a mortal woman from the south of Ireland. She loves the island in the fair weather of September and October (months sacred to Manannan) but when winter sets in she nearly dies of homesickness. Manannan transforms her into a seal where she lives happily among the waves and rocks for the cold months and returns to her form as a maiden in the fair months.


SKELLIG MICHAEL

January 2005


Looking back from the great civilizations
of 12th-century France or 17th-century
Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite
a long time -- almost a hundred years --
Western Christianity survived by clinging
to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle
of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast,
rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

-- Kenneth Clark

Here is your most desolate
shore of rock, southwest
of all we build and till
and love: What a brutal
bed it is, O Lord,
500 feet of stone perched
above a sea-blast
which choirs below
all dreams with the
blessed thunder
of salt’s destiny.
You bid me build
this oratory beyond
all ears, joining my
voice to mashing waves
and a legion of gales,
each note not so
much offered as ripped
from my lips. Here
the oldest gods are
ravenous and raw,
their bones knocking
like boulders against
first rock, fucking
and dismembering
and roaring pure blue
riot, foaling water-dragons
of the tongue I dare not
speak but must because
this hour derives its
gospel from such abyss.
O God it’s lonely here
between angel wing
and heartless tide,
my song a rock
gnawed by appetites
which have no human
end, or, at least
for which few people
I have known would
care to bend their
inner ear. So be it,
ten waves I daily row:
I will make of this
mote in the sea’s
eternal eye a chapel
for every selkie and
child of Lir to lose
their wits on their
way here, long ago
today and perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps
as long as this rock
remains at the last
shore of the heart.


MANANNAN AND ST. COLUMBA


St. Columba breaks a chalice and sends a servant to have it repaired. The servant encounter Manannan on his way and the god magically restores the chalice. The god sends the servant back to Columba with question: would he achieve Christian immortality? When the servant shows Columba the healed chalice and submits the god’s question, the ungrateful saint replies, “There is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!” The servant returns to Manannan with the answer, who broke out into indignant lament. “Woe is me, Manannan mac Lir! For years I’ve helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I’ll do it no more, till they’re weak as water. I’ll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland.”

Ironically, when Columba dies there is a sudden shaft of light in his cell; it is said that St. Michael (Manannan) came and spirited the soul of the saint to heaven. (Which heaven, we might ask: Celtic or Christian?)


PSALM FOR MICHAEL

Michaelmas 2004

O holy Micheal
warden of the deep
Protector of the prow
passing homeward
through my days

Exult your tide
behind me as I write;
connect the shores
of the next poem
with your vast keep

And blue its bones
with the wash
of lower heavens,

That these ribs
joist and tenon
a chapel for every

ocean traveller
who’s lost the
sound of shores.

Be thou here
the suck and draw
of that homeward tide
of lovers, sots and
sailors as we crash
and ebb our sojourns;

Write thy psalms
upon this beach
so pale and ghostly
before first light,
lamped by the
high-flung ice of stars.

Surge your salt-white
horse inside these lines
and I’ll not look back
to see if your tidal
thunder is real or no.

God of wet surrender,
slake your thirst
on these dry pages,
and I will ferry
you to distant days:

-- today, for one,
perhaps tomorrow,
til silence drowns
the page.


THE FEAST
OF ST. MICHAEL

2004

The blessed: they gathered their lives,
but He Himself gathered them up, in order to
utterly return them to the vast things of this world:
the wind, the animals and the many colored wreath
which binds all things together, Next To next to
Next To.
-- from “The Blessed,” Ranier Maria
Rilke, transl. Franz Wright

After the great storms passed
leaving lakes and rivers
to swarm the banks
with heaven’s full receipt,
it was no longer summer
but a time of dark heavier
than still-sunny days,
thicker too despite
soft afternoon breezes,
voweled and rowed by
this feast of St. Michael.
I see him spreading his
bright pale blue wings
overhead at 5 a.m.
his lucence composed
of sea-phosphor and
the milky scree of heaven.
He’s piloting the moon
surely toward the nextmost
isle of this next year,
ferrying the clench
and riot of summer past
toward home, piled now with
the leafy wrack of winds.
Amazing that it can be
so still this morning,
the moony sky almost
porcelain and the garden
outside like a black
elven lace, older than
all storms, more ripe
now than I have words
to say, unfurling in its
purple and pale white
flowers a quiet music
wider, wilder even, than
any angel’s star-brocaded
wings. They’re singing
boat songs for the
great water loosed by
hurricanes as it
harrows and dreams
down through the
limestone shelves below,
down into the vast vault
of the aquifer where
Michael tides and
shores us all.


BRAN AND MANANNAN


(from Alwyn and Brinsley Rees, Celtic Heritage)


Manannan is on his way to Ireland where he will beget Mongan upon the wife of Fiachna, and he prophesies the coming of Christ to save the world from the sin of Adam.

“Steadily then let Bran row,
It is not far to the Land of the Women,
Emne with its many hues of hospitality
You will reach before the setting of the sun!”

Bran goes his way and comes to the Island of Joy, where he sees a large crowd of people all laughing and gaping. He sends a man ashore and the man begins to gape with the others, heedless of the calls of his comrades. So they leave him there.

Before long they reach the Land of the Women. The leading woman greets him: “Come hither on land, O Bran son of Febal. Welcome is your coming.” She throws a ball of thread which cleaves to Bran’s hand, and she pulls the boat ashore by the thread. They enter a large house where there is a bed for every couple, even thrice nine beds, and the food that is put before them does not diminish. “It seemed a year to them that they were there; it was really many years.” Then one of the company becomes homesick, and Bran is persuaded to depart. The woman says they will regret it, warns them not to touch land, and directs them to pick up the man left on the Island of Joy.

They approach the land of Ireland at Srub Brain, where there is an assembly of people. Bran tells the assembly that he is Bran son of Febal, but they know no such man, though the Voyage of Bran is in their ancient stories. The homesick man jumps ashore, but as he touches the ground he becomes a heap of ashes, as though he had been dead for many hundreds of years. Bran tells the assembled people all his wanderings and he writes the verses in ogam. Then he bids them farewell. “And from that hour his wanderings are not known.”


Elegy - Seamus heaney

The God in the Sea Greets Bran
In the Land of the Waves

Seamus Heaney

(from the Eighth-Century Irish “Voyage of Bran”)

When Bran and his companions had been at sea for two days and two nights, they saw a man in a chariot coming toward them over the sea. The man sang to them and made himself known, saying he was Manannan. These are some of the verses he sang:

Bran is astonished at the beauty of the waters;
his coracle lifts on the clear wave.
I ride where he rows; my chariot plunges, I
surge through a blossoming plain.

Bran rolls with his boat, the sea lifts and
lays him, he leans to the prow.
My chariot axle threshes a surf of wildflowers,
my wheels are spattered with flower juice.

Bran sees the backs of the waves like the quick
backs of dolphins; the sea surface glitters.
I see greensward, wild roses and clover,
the pelt of the grazing.

You look and next thing salmon leap out
of the foam; mother-wet silver.
They are my calves, my calves’ licks, my
lambs, my bleating cavorters.

One chariot, one charioteer—me at full tilt—
that’s all you can see.
You are blind to what’s here. The land is a drumming
of hoofbeats, a mane-flow, a host at full gallop.

The land is immense, we swarm in its
bounty, it flourishes for us.
You are welcome; from the prow, gather up
the fruit of the branches.

Men and women, lovely, at ease among
windfalls. No sin and no forcing.
They rise off the forest floor, they pour
out the wine.

We are from the beginning, won’t grow
old or go under the earth.
We cannot imagine debility; we
are unmarked by guilt.

BRAN AND MANANNAN

2004

Our kiss to me is velvet slush,
A door to wild infinities.
To you the door is also there
But opens to your dream home, the
Order and security of days,
Bright flowers on a tabletop
I’d sweep violently away
To swive you merrily, then eat
Dinner there with great repast, and
Take you up to bed for a last
Toddy, leaving the mess for day.
Ah but the care of things is just
The point of your love, an eros of
Things laced with a cat’s even grace.
Yet our far hearts still make one race.


ST. MICHAEL AND MANANNAN

1995

Based on the drawing by William Blake
of St. Michael binding Satan

1.
St. Michael to Manannan

He was part of the darkness
that was once my own.
But you bid me rise
so many leagues
that he became
my abandoned depth.
I think of him now
like the amputee
who wakes cupping
a breast in the dream
of a trembling hand.
Once he tried
to drag me home
and we fought halfway
to the bottom of the sea.
As we wrestled
my hair grew white
and his eyes
slit to dragon coals.
The waters
boiled round us
in a terrible swirl,
chasing sea
beasts to the broken
porches of Atlantis.
When I finally
broke his hold
and fettered him
in your chains,
his face sank
the thousand
leagues of grief.
Often these days
I think of him
disappearing into
those silt shadows.
My heart at least
has never been a blade.
You've built your walls
and towers now,
demanding a new
heaven of Gothic stone.
But understand
that each time
I intercede for you
and jam my white
sword in to
the bloody hilt,
an ancient narwhal
suddenly breaks
the sea to pierce
God in the back.

2.
Manannan to St. Michael

When the last lock
snapped into
the links of doom
and he rose like
a white sword
to the sky,
I fell into deep
chill moodier
than any fairy spell.
The waters darkened
about me in a cloak
that forever hid
me from your view.
To me you portioned
hoof and horn,
the least parts of
the king's stag.
You paupered
my waves with
cunning boats.
Banished from
the cities to hide in
distant hills and islands,
I became a sleek
captain of absence,
forced to ply my
trade in dream
and sensual smoke.
My gold meadows
blazed to stubbled char.
I understand
that every time
I meet him the white
sword wins all.
Ah, but if you only
understood how those
losses make me strong!
I ripen on a vine that curls
about your sickness,
sorrow and death.
If you would only love
the gall now chilling
into winter, the gates
of my damnation
would forever close.
Perhaps then
the white prince
and I could resume
our song upon that
apple branch
where the fruit is
sweet and cold
and heavy as sleep,
where each bite
fills the mouth with moon,
and the juice runs darkly
down God's uncertain smile
the way eternal lovers
find the greatest grace
exactly where they fail.

The Moon Child

THE THREE MARVELS OF HY

III: THE MOON-CHILD

((From Washer of the Ford, by Fiona Macleod, 1896 Geddes edition))



A YEAR and a day before God bade Colum arise to the Feast of Eternity, Pòl the Freckled, the youngest of the brethren, came to him, on a night of the nights.

"The moon is among the stars, O Colum. By his own will, and yours, old Murtagh that is this day with God, is to be laid in the deep dry sand at the east end of the isle."

So the holy Saint rose from his bed of weariness, and went and blessed the place that Murtagh lay in, and bade neither the creeping worm nor any other creature to touch the sacred dead. "Let God only," he said "let God alone strip that which he made to grow."

But on his way back sleep passed from him. The sweet salt smell of the sea was in his nostrils: he heard the running of a wave in all his blood.

At the cells he turned, and bade the brethren go in. "Peace be with you," he sighed wearily.
Then he moved downwards towards the sea.

A great tenderness of late was upon Colum the Bishop. Ever since he had blessed the fishes and the flies, the least of the children of God, his soul had glowed in a whiter flame. There were deep seas of compassion in his grey-blue eyes. One night he had waked, because God was there.

"O Christ," he cried, bowing low his old grey head. "Sure, ah sure, the gladness and the joy, because of the hour of the hours." But God said: "Not so, Colum, who keepest me upon the Cross. It is Murtagh, Murtagh the Druid that was, whose soul I am taking to the glory."

With that Colum rose in awe and great grief. There was no light in his cell. In the deep darkness, his spirit quailed. But lo, the beauty of his heart wrought a soft gleam about him, and in that moonshine of good deeds he rose and made his way to where Murtagh slept.

The old monk slept indeed. It was a sweet breath he drew---he, young and fair now, and laughing with peace under the apples in Paradise.

"O Murtagh," Colum cried, "and thee I thought the least of the brethren, because that thou wast a Druid, and loved not to see thy pagan kindred put to the sword if they would not repent. But, true, in my years I am becoming as a boy who learns, knowing nothing. God wash the sin of pride out of my life!"
At that a soft white shining, as of one winged and beautiful, stood beside the dead.

"Art thou Murtagh? " whispered Colum, in deep awe.

"No, I am not Murtagh," came as the breath of vanishing song.

"What art thou?"

"I am Peace," said the glory.

Thereupon Colum sank to his knees, sobbing with joy, for the sorrow that had been and was no more.

"Tell me, O White Peace" he murmured, "can Murtagh hearken, there under the apples where God is?"

"God's love is a wind that blows hitherward and hence. Speak, and thou shalt hear."

Colum spake. "O Murtagh my brother, tell me in what way it is that I still keep God crucified upon the Cross."

There was a sound in the cell as of the morning-laughter of children, of the singing of birds, of the sunlight streaming through the blue fields of Heaven.

Then Murtagh's voice came out of Paradise, sweet with the sweetness: honey-sweet it was, and clothed with deep awe because of the glory.

"Colum, servant of Christ, arise!"

Colum rose, and was as a leaf there, a leaf that is in the wind.

"Colum, thine hour is not yet come. I see it, bathing in the white light which is the Pool of Eternal Life, that is in the abyss where deep-rooted are the Gates of Heaven."

"And my sin, O Murtagh, my sin?"

"God is weary because thou hast not repented."

"O my God and my God! Sure, Murtagh, if that is so, it is so, but it is not for knowledge to me. Sure, O God, it is a blessing I have put on man and woman, on beast and bird and fish, on creeping things and flying things, on the green grass and the brown earth and the flowing wave, on the wind that cometh and goeth, and on the mystery of the flame! Sure, O God, I have sorrowed for all my sins: there is not one I have not fasted and prayed for. Sorrow upon me!---Is it accursed I am, or what is the evil that holdeth me by the hand?

Then Murtagh, calling through sweet dreams and the rainbow-rain of happy tears that make that place so wondrous and so fair, spake once more:

"O Colum, blind art thou. Hast thou yet repented because after that thou didst capture the great black seal, that is a man under spells, thou, with thy monks, didst crucify him upon the great rock at the place where, long ago, thy coracle came ashore?"

"O Murtagh, favoured of God, will you not be explaining to Him that is King of the Elements, that this was because the seal who was called Black Angus wrought evil upon a mortal woman, and that of the sea-seed was sprung one who had no soul?"

But no answer came to that, and when Colum looked about him, behold there was no soft shining, but only the body of Murtagh the old monk. With a heavy heart, and his soul like a sinking boat in a sea of pain, he turned and went out into the night.

A fine, wonderful night it was. The moon lay low above the sea, and all the flowing gold and flashing silver of the rippling running water seemed to be a flood going that way and falling into the shining hollow splendour.

Through the sea-weed the old Saint moved, weary and sad. When he came to a sandy place he stopped. There, on a rock, he saw a little child. Naked she was, though clad with soft white moonlight. In her hair were brown weeds of the sea, gleaming golden because of the glow. In her hands was a great shell, and at that shell was her mouth. And she was singing this song; passing sweet to hear it was, with the sea-music that was in it:

A little lonely child am I
That have not any soul:
God made me but a homeless wave,
Without a goal.
A seal my father was, a seal
That once was man:
My mother loved him tho' he was
'Neath mortal ban.
He took a wave and drownèd her,
She took a wave and lifted him
And I was born where shadows are
I' the sea-depths dim.
All through the sunny blue-sweet hours
I swim and glide in waters green;
Never by day the mournful shores
By me are seen.
But when the gloom is on the wave
A shell unto the shore I bring:
And then upon the rocks I sit
And plaintive sing.
O what is this wild song I sing,
With meanings strange and dim?
No soul am I, a wave am I,
And sing the Moon-Child's hymn.

Softly Colum drew nigh.

"Peace," he said. "Peace, little one. Ah tender little heart, peace!"

The child looked at him with wide seadusky eyes.

"Is it Colum the Holy you will be?"

No, my fawn, my white dear babe: it is not Colum the Holy I am, but Colum the poor fool that knew not God!"

"Is it you, O Colum, that put the sorrow on my mother, who is the Sea-woman that lives in the whirlpool over there?"

"Ay, God forgive me!"

"Is it you, O Colum, that crucified the seal that was my father: him that was a man once, and that was called Black Angus?"

"Ay, God forgive me!"

"Is it you, O Colum, that bade the children of Hy run away from me, because I was a moon-child, and might win them by the seaspell into the green wave?"

"Ay, God forgive me!"

"Sure, dear Colum, it was to the glory of God, it was?"

"Ay, He knoweth it, and can hear it, too, from Murtagh, who died this night."

"Look!"

And at that Colum looked, and in a moongold wave he saw Black Angus, the seal-man, drifting dark, and the eyes in his round head were the eyes of love. And beside the manseal swam a woman fair to see, and she looked at him with joy, and with joy at the Moon-Child that was her own, and at Colum with joy.
Thereupon Colum fell upon his knees and cried---

Give me thy sorrow, wild woman of the sea!"

"Peace to you, Colum," she answered, and sank into the shadow-thridden wave.

"Give my thy death and crucifixion, O Angus-dhu! " cried the Saint, shaking with the sorrow.

"Peace to you, Colum," answered the manseal, and sank into the dusky quietudes of the deep.

"Ah, bitter heart o' me! Teach me the way to God, O little child," cried Colum the old, turning to where the Moon-Child was!

But lo, the glory and the wonder!

It was a little naked child that looked at him with healing eyes, but there were no seaweeds in her hair, and no shell in the little wee hands of her. For now, it was a male Child that was there, shining with a light fair sunny hair was a from within : and in his shadowy crown of thorns, and in his hand was a pearl of great price.

"O Christ, my God," said Colum, with failing voice.

"It is thine now, O Colum," said the MoonChild, holding out to him the shining pearl of great price.

"What is it, O Lord my God?" whispered the old servant of God that was now glad with the gladness:
"what is this, thy boon?"

"Perfect Peace."

And that is all.

(To God be the Glory. Amen.)

Unlovely Rita

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

- Mad King Lear

The Backward Glance (REVISED)

Introduction


This essay spirals down and up the story of a backward glance.

St. Columba’s encounter with the shade of St. Oran in the footers of his yet-standing abbey at Iona has been a fructive one for me: its pale lucency, like a moon hauled up from millennial waters, has provided an eerie wattage to my daily meditations, compassing much of my studies and poems over the years. As origins go it’s a weird tale, blent of old and new dominions, half composed of the face of St. Columba staring back, oh just for one fateful moment, back into depths of his pagan past, the other half composed of the grinning skull of Oran, risen from that dark, staring back. When I imagine that moment, something important yet never fully knowable burns in my mind, like full moonlight on a standing stone.

Columba’s bright white mission—saving souls, building monestaries, copying books—seems archetypal of every constructive, articulate, deepening, questing life. Yet none of it could have happened without that backward glance.

It is a perplex glance. There is something explicit in it, desperate to hold onto the physical reality of that which is being resolutely spaded over. It is also foolhardy and stubborn glance, defiant of commons sense and divine law, and owes allegiance to greater origins than any contemporary canon can vaunt or vault. Too lunar and sea-washed to truly build upon, it has foundations which reach down to doom.

But most of all, it is a pregnant glance. For St. Columba, it occurs at the moment he is between exile from one land and founding a new life’s work in another. There can be no forward moment until that backward glance has completed its descending, original work—a work which forms an interior bridge to the future.


I.

As an early leading light of the Celtic Church, St. Columba’s life was a complex one, vital in the raw seam between old and new dominions. He was exiled from Ireland in 563 AD over the copying of a psalter in secret. When the owner demanded it back (books were private property, unlike the songs of bards) Columba assembled his warriors and pitched into battle, shouting “As Christ is my Druid!” Columba’s force was divinely and lopsidedly victorious in battle, but it resulted in ostracism by his native country. He was summarily exiled from royal ambition and excommunicated by his church. His penance was to be dispatched upon the ocean desert in a boat with twelve of his followers. The additional ban upon Columba was heavy: He was not look to back on his homeland again, and he was to save as many souls as had died in his bloody battle for possession of a book. He and his crew rowed north and east until they came to a shore from which they could not see the faintest outline of Ireland. That place was Iona, a small island off the southwestern shores of Scotland. Religious rites had been practiced that sacred isle for ages, far back beyond all of Christendom’s precedents.

Out of sight of his homeland, exiled from throne and bishopic, Columba enacts the ritual drama of entitlement to Iona’s energies, tapping a legacy which was old in equal measure to the hot futurity that would fly out from the saint’s newly-minted Christian ambition. The two halves, oldest and newest, seem paradoxically joined, but the infernal logic proved fructive.

The story of what ensued is well-known to this community. At first, the abbey construction fared badly; each day’s work is leveled overnight by a malignancy of wind. The watch for the night is found dead amid the fallen timbers. The entire work of beginning is at a standstill. Columba’s work is dead in the water, so to speak, until he comes terms with the latent energies of the land. His dilemma is very much that of Christianity in the British Isles of that time, barely a generation into literacy and the spread of monestaries which perpetuated the new faith and its glosses. The old canon seemed corrupt, too blood-soaked, weedy with bards, its venerations too week, its deities too distant; but the new canon, with its imported Latin and Mediterranean iconography, desperately needed to be grounded into local articulation.

Thus Columba himself vigils on a tempest-blasted night on the eve of the Irish Church, staring deep into the maw of origin. From that first backward glance an apparition appears, a half-woman, half fish risen from the brutal mash of the midnight gale and sea. The creature—in modern lingo we might imagine her mythologically as a mermaid or selkie, or psychologically as a mediatrix or anima-figure—declares that the sea god Manannan had been disturbed by the cutting of the sward and that a man must be sacrificed by burying him standing up in a hole twice as tall as he dug in the footers. This was old pagan practice; bones have been found in digs of many old structures throughout Europe and the British Isles. Merlin himself supposed to be buried in the footers of Vortigern’s tower so that it could stand.

Columba, with a strange and seemingly heretic intuition, decides to heed the apparition, and Oran either volunteers or is selected via lot for the sacrifice. On October 28, three nights before Halloween, the eve of the Celtic New Year, Oran climbs into a muddy cold hole dug in the center of the abbey’s foundations, and submits to his internment by his brothers.

Columba’s second backward glance comes on Halloween night—naturally!—when he wishes to look upon the face of his friend Oran again. He is also eager for news of what his friend has discovered in his night sea voyage to the Otherworld. He bids his fellow monks dig down and uncover Oran. But once the face is revealed, Oran’s eyes pop open and his mouth looses a string of chilling words: “There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” Surely this is pure pagan antipathy to the new faith, akin to the dialogue Columba would later have with the seal-man Black Angus MacOdrum on the shores of the sea, who satirized the cleric in exquisite Gaelic. The risk of looking back is eloquently phrased at this moment of encounter.

Too much information! seems to be Columba’s response, who promptly had the babbling skull covered back over with dirt, exclaiming, “Mud, mud back over Oran’s mouth, lest he blab no more!” The survival of this story into the present—Hebridean parents still scold their children with Columba’s words when they have spoken out of turn—bespeaks something deeply psychological about Columba’s response. Columba needed his backward glance, but what to keep and what to quell of what came into view?

What Columba does next in the story provides a deeply satisfying answer, for he commits his friend back to the ground and death yet at the same time declares him patron of island’s graveyard, saying “no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran.” Columba accesses and harnesses the energies of both pagan and Christian Otherworlds by sacrificing Oran to both. And it proved a mighty pronouncement, because Releig Odhrain became a immensely revered graveyard, housing the bones of many Scottish, Irish and Norwegian kings.

Then comes the the of Columba’s transformed life and mission, recorded in the Life of Columba by Adamanan, third abbot of Iona (reputedly one of the finest examples of biography since Augustine’s Confessions; in his retelling, Adamnan makes the myth out of the man). And the story is pure miracle, mystery and magnificence. He becomes one of the pillars of the emerging Celtic church, founding many monestaries, sending scores of missionaries into Pictish Scotland and championing the copying of texts with such unrivalled artistry that one astonished reader of the Book of Kells (which Columba is reputed to have labored on) would deem it “the work of an angel.”

Columba’s story has one more backward glance, and is perhaps the strangest one, since it is rigidly framed around the impossibility of that glance. Columba returned only once to Ireland, in blindfold and facing the other way—owing to the ban which was the condition of his exile—to settle a dispute over the elimination of the poetic class, which was at the time threatening to bankrupt the land with demands for tribute. Columba made an impassioned speech for the poets at the Council of Drumceatt. He said to the assembled nobles, “Humans of dust, you are nothing but a story. How you get your living or your clothing is your story. I urge you to keep the bards among you, for it is better to buy the enduring story than a fleeting one.” It was a winning (and essential) appeal, and as a result the bardic class was preserved though downsized, and mandated to become more open to all through the building of schools. The bards were also instructed to oversee the writing down of the old stories, allowing for one of the most remarkable survivals of an oral literature into a written one.
So the backward glance here is a spiritualized one, blindfolded, so to speak, to prevent action on the physical plane, forcing it to another gradient, that of a mental backward glance which embraced of a dying culture by burying it in the texts of the next culture.

The tropes and rigors of the past must be outlived. Fathers must be buried and their ghostly reminders exiled to ramparts and lonely islands. Yet the miracle of Irish Christianity—in the early centuries, at least—was that it built its monestaries in a weird partnership with its past that celebrated the story even when it contradicted new articulations. Maybe it seems aberrational because so much history has simply piled up ruination upon ruination. Much of our human nature is similarly fraught; laziness and fear conspire to wall off the backward glance, let sleeping bones lie, opting instead to stay safe and warm within the security of the known.

Surely Columba would not have needed the backward glance had he been allowed to enter the royal fray back in Ireland (he was in succession to the Ui Neill throne), or even had he remained at Derry, where he founded his first monestary. It took the catastrophes of his life—going into battle with his profane and sacred fathers over the copying of a text, and the subsequent exile and excommunication—for Columba to turn back upon far older sources for his inspiration, his fire, his saintly libido. Look back he did though, long and hard, and from that backward glance he hauled up a rich and fecund futurity.




II.


I’ve been encountering that backward glance a lot recently in my reading, as if I were being shouted at by disparate skulls of an lost choir. Most of those encounters have been in literature, mythically poetic. They lead me to believe that in the quintessence of the backward glance, the literal alchemizes into the literary. Fiona Macleod once called Oran “the adventure of the dreaming mind,” and Columba’s backward glance is seeped in Oran. Indeed, his story of how he came to meet up with Oran has literary origins, since he got into his pickle over his devotion to the poetry of the Psalms. One etymological root of Oran is o-ran or “song,” so literally Columba buries an old song that it vitiate its next singer. Our crises and epiphanies are rounded by a strange sweet music, whether it wears the formal feathered singing robe of the tuion or is being nervously read by some teenager in the Glen of the Temple.

***

Orpheus, ur-poet, was a renowned singer, but his story had to go through hell and back before its found its greatest registers. Robbed of his wife Eurydice on their wedding day—she steps on a snake in field in which they were to be joined—he descends to hell to retrieve her, wooing all the deities down under with his song, and manages to win her release on the condition that she follow him out and that he must not look back until they have cleared the final threshold of Hades. Ovid writes in his Metamorphoses,

They climbed a hill through clouds, pitch-dark and gloomy,
And as they neared the surface of the Earth,
The poet, fearful that she’d lost her way,
Glanced backward with a look that spoke his love—
Then saw her gliding into deeper darkness,
As he reached out to hold her, she was gone;
He had embraced a world of emptiness.
This was her second death—and yet she could not blame him
(Was not his greatest fault great love for her?)
She answered him with one last faint “Good-bye,”
An echo of her voice from deep Avernus.
(transl. Horace Gregory)

For Orpheus, the backward glance is his fatal error, yet it is also a bridge to his own transformation. The loss of Eurydice seems to me a deeply sexual one, for desire’s consummation is the shore we can never get back to once its gone. Like Orpheus, we all remember our loves lost, and revel in the those now incorporeal passions with a dogged backward glance.

Devastated by the immensity of his loss—Eurydice now twice dead, twice lost—Orpheus grieves inconsolably by the waters of Hell, the magic of his love-song spent, useless to him. But then the story abruptly changes: he animates, turns back to the living world and climbs up Mount Haemus where he establishes a monestary of sorts, renouncing the love of women and singing paeans to Apollo. The transformation of Orpheus has to do with an alchemy in his song; Orpheus thought he was bringing real gold back from the dead, but his backward glance mediated Eurydice—an ancient moon-goddess—into “the stone hard to attain,” which we moderns would call psychological reflection: psyche in the service of the imagination.

The old, wild music must die in order to grow into the future, but letting go of it isn’t easy. The backward glance is our refusal to give up on the fantasies of perfect mortal union implicit in every torch song. But let go we must, else we fail to grow into an even wilder music. Rilke writes in his third “Sonnet to Orpheus,”

... Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced open wide by your own voice -- learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
(transl. Stephen Mitchell)

***

In the tragedy of Hamlet, the backward glance encounters a ghost which forcefully demands obedience—and revenge. Hamlet, arguably the origin and zenith of modern consciousness, is radicalized by his parley with the ghost of his murdered father, decked out in the archaic armor of medieval Denmark (the story was imported by Shakespeare from the three centuries back). Father bids son to commit regicide in vengeance for the same crime. To refuse a father’s command is anathema to a son’s superego, but to heed such a voice is perilous to the soul, as Horatio argues with his prince:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
that beetles o’er his base into the sea,
and there assume some other horrible form
which might deprive you of your soverienty of reason,
and draw you into madness? Think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
without more motive into every brain
that looks so many fadoms to the sea
and hears it roar beneath. (I, iii)

That sea echoes chillingly under the voice of Hamlet when he demands that his friends vow not to speak of the encounter to others. Swear, the Ghost repeats after the son, like the booming of a fatal tide.

In his backward, sea-winding glance, Hamlet transforms from afflicted son into tragedian of the mind, and everything which then transpires in the play is a virtual resonance of his aybssal imaginings. Bending his outward and once-noble purposes toward madness and murder, at the same time he develops an enormous voice in conversation with its certain demise. That conversation resonates loud as ever five centuries later, perhaps because Hamlet was willing to look back on the dread origin of every true utterance.

It is said that the Hamlet we have today is the descendent of an earlier, failed version of the play, an ur-Hamlet Shakespeare wrote in the early 1590s; into the mythic mix which has so drawn critics is the fact that Shakespeare apparently had a son Hamnet who died young. So the surviving play with its eerie bold protagonist is both the son of an earlier work and the literary ghost of a real son. When Hamlet looks upon his spectral father on the ramparts of black Elsinore and hears a voice blent with the booming beacon of an even darker sea, the tale which ensues outlives every age.

***

The backward glance which points toward the sea also figures in the main inspiration of John Keats, whose greatness as a poet may be because, like Columba, his ghosts limned the border between real persons and literary ones. He was profoundly stirred by his reading, but the crisis he had to work through was to find a way of welcoming those shades without being buried and silenced by them.

Keats was 15 when his mother died and he was forced to leave school (his father was already dead) and seek employment to help care for his orphaned brother and sister. Almost in response to this turn of events, his reading suddenly became a furious engagement for him. According his old schoolmaster, whom Keats continued to visit and who introduced the young poet to much of that reading, a backward glance on a line from Spencer’s Faerie Queene, was the catalyst for his short yet unparalleled career. The anecdote is related in Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Keats:

.. as a young horse would through a spring meadow—amping! Like a true poet, too—born, not manufactured, a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, “what an image that is—‘sea-shouldering whales!’’’

According to another biographer quoted in Bates,

“It was ‘Faery Queene’ that awakened (Keats’s) genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being: till, enamored of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded.”

Spenser’s retelling of an old Celtic tale sprung a magic door in Keat’s latent imagination, unleashing from below (or behind) an equally if not wilder sea of invention.

Bates posits that it was his genius for looking back that was the agency of Keats’s unparalleled development, “the sort of empathy -- the adhesive, imaginative identification—that increasingly marked (his) own poetry and that later deepened in his clairvoyant understanding of Shakespeare.”

Negative Capability is just that -- “The ability to negate one’s identity, to lose it in something larger or more meaningful than oneself.” (Bates.) To step aboard that big fish and ride it to hell, high water and whatever Truths a human heart can abide. At least on paper.

***

In the “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick, Herman Melville seeks to add depth and resonance to his already wild and most worthy tale by joining the task of the Pequod—or rather, of dark Ahab and the White Whale—or, rather still, of a contemporary author and the next timeless work—with primary sources. “The more I dive into this matter of whaling,” Melville writes in the persona of Ishmael, the Horatio who survives to tell the tale, “and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it.” He adds, “I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.”

He then ranges through a variety of mythic whale-sized endeavors, from Perseus freeing Andromeda from Leviathan to Jonah spending three nights in a whale, from Hercules battling his way out of one to St. George defeating the Dragon (pairing whales and dragons with this quote from Ezekiel: “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea”).

Yet that such precedents are not enough to give full resonance to his tale. Thus looks further back:

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods and prophets alone compose the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is till to be named, for like royal kings of old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wonderful oriental story is now rehearsed from Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; -- Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.

When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?”

Indeed. The tale transforms the deeper it goes. Melville descends from the contemporary reality of whale-hunting to the history and mystery of whale-harrowing, riding the whale, camping in the whale, fighting out of the whale, all the way down to becoming the whale, a sort of shamanic assumption of the whale’s body, flukes and all. And there, at the bottom of things, is the very text that enables God to create the world and Melville to write his book—infernal Vedas, perhaps, but of a language containing all the Shakespearean depth and resonance is sea tale needed.





III


Three perspectives are layered in that backward glance, like dimensions or conjoined threshold, and each is necessary to get to the unexpected fourth result—a vision of pure futurity. Maybe the backward glance is alchemical in nature, following the dictum that “out of the three comes the one.” First there is the burning desire to follow the apparition into “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns.” Second there is the voice encountered back there, drenched in origin, more awful and awesome than any human throat seems capable of welling. And third, there a pregnant pause or crossroads which requires a response, each one fraught with consequence. Obey? Defy? Bury? Build?

The fourth result is unexpected and miraculous: the backward glance devours whole the devouring whale. The encounter is spiritualized, made mythic. Dark energies (which were always in the individual psyche to begin with) are appeased and now fructify the work. As Erich Neumann writes in The Origin and History of Consciousness,

“The assimilation of unconscious contents, in whatever form, leads not only to an enrichment of the conscious material but to an enrichment of libido, which makes itself felt, subjectively, as an excitement, vivacity, and a joy that sometimes borders on intoxication; and, objectively, as a heightening of interest, a broadened and intensified capacity for work, mental alertness, etc.”

In the process of realizing and assimilating “Oran,” the unconscious content, the ego “Columba” makes a “descent,” from the conscious standpoint, into the depths, in order to raise up the “treasure.” In terms of psychic energy, the pleasure of the “conquering hero” arises from the combination of conscious libido with that of the newly acquired content which is incorporated. There is more vigor for the copying of texts and missionizing the Picts than can possibly be imagined, but that’s where it came from.

***

It is in this fourth dimension entered via the backward glance—in the metalinguistic veld or pleroma where I and Thou are one—where the real work always begins. It is at once an intuition of the depths, hearkening to its sea-like cry, tapping enough of its tidal desire to wash all of that raw energy forward.

It’s important to note here that we look glancingly and not stare fixedly; only a drop of that ocean is needed. Sirens freeze the imagination, and dark waters compel with the Medusa’s frozen stare of horror. No: the backward glance must turn back round, and when it does, it turns back upon present and future with eyes harrowed by what it saw rising from sea and grave. Such harrowing hallows the vision, allowing it to focus on the essential work at hand. There in the visage of the lost lies the reflection of the future, if one is schooled with the proper eyes, if one is ready to embrace older numens, if one can find a means to sing back with words wilder than wind.

Full Moon Plus Killer Whales

Hot weekend, temps in the late 90s, withering midday labors as usual though with some percentage less soak of humidity. But the early mornings and evenings are fine, yielding quaffs of autumnally ebbing light, comfort of the air, and this weekend a September moon that hangs brilliant & halcyon & utter blue through cloudless nights, soaking the night’s topography, drowning us all in primal lucence. Halleylooyah.

Working all weekend on an essay of sorts for the occasion of retreat at my father’s Columcille that I won’t be able to make, sending in lieu of physical presence an bit of poetic prosetry on the Backward Glance, particularly St. Columba’s on his pagan past. That fertile scoop of dark waters which makes all future endeavors a similitude of them, jazzy & blue & endlessly deep. I’ve added a latter section on the backward glances of Orpheus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Keats, all similar in reaching back and facing one’s forebearing forboding forbidding depths, father to ur-father, the assembly of guardian paternities who stand between me and the utter uteral blue of the Mother. Something which happens in that backward glance which radicalizes the heart and spiritualizes the mind, repressing perhaps the rude primals while marrowing my mortar with their abundant libido. The retreat this weekend is to discuss the future of Columcille, so I thought a backward glance appropriate for that council. Similar perhaps to Columba’s pitch for Oran (the song, the query, the watery adventure of the mind) at the Council of Drimceatt. More to follow here on that.

***

Last night watched Michael Powell’s magnificent "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946) on Turner Classics, reveling in the imaginative harrows of it -- the story of a bomber pilot who survives his dive out of a burning plane sans parachute, robbing Heaven of one its ordained receipts, falling in love with a woman by the shore and then having to argue his case for remaining on earth with eternity. The shots of life are in living color, the otherworld scenes in black and white. Magnificent this upward-scrolling stair flanked by massive stone figures -- Lincoln, Plato, Solomon -- who might argue the case of the love-sotted bomber, but its is his friend -- a neurophysician who dies in a motorcycle accident trying to help his case --- who takes the stand before the eternal court. Arguing for love which transcends the bounds of heaven. (Though the argument really is for that passion fired in the imagination).

***

Dreamt last night (in the caul of that movie, frustrating hours trying to knock out the essay, thoughts of Keats -- reading his biography as I watched college games on Saturday -- and bathed throughout by that rising regent moon -- I dreamed of these two huge orcas which were threatening the southern coast of the USA like twin hurricanes, ravaging the shores, fomenting sea and sky in Their Brute Appearance, mother and child, father and son, sea and sky, I dunnoß, but the dream goes on about how threatening they are, how they overreach all past magnitudes and scope of killing ground, far from their previous habitat. It is thought that the shores of the eastern Atlantic would be safe, they having never left the Gulf; but then suddenly I see them rounding Miami, leaping and then diving into the cold depths of the Atlantic, holy shit, see ‘em like blue bolts of hell shooting downward into the abyss. Trouble ahead.

News today of tropical storm Rita quickly forming over Bermuda, heading for the Florida Keys, maybe bringing some rain to us by mid-week hopefully but what will happen when if the storm gets into the Gulf, a la Katrina, strengthening in that soft warm uterus, where will She bend Her terrible jaws?