The Upwelling Dream / Poem

THE DREAM FORGE

If work is our yoga, our dreams dark
labors are its sutra, lessons of
unsheathable fire plunged deep
in awfulness. There is a furnace in the
basement of my heart, a hell
where imps grease old gears
and maul the presses where
my life is published, day after difficult
day, each a sum of hope and woe
balled tight and tossed into the
maelstrom, sustaining the engines
which roll me back here once again
for the next long daily fray.
Love’s torture is also racked there,
desire’s jezebells heaving their
cleavage in motions that cut me
raw and clean, their lips always just
beyond the ache of my kiss, their voices
taunting, swooning, accusing, their
sweet abysms always walking away,
finding me in my love faulty and
with means far short and droopy
of their own penetrate depths.
Each wave’s folds and crash booms
down those metal halls in full
augment of ebb, descending miles
and fathoms down. Endless are the toils
and smarts here in the forges of that smith,
maker and renewer of what is both art
and its heart, all my bright gleaming
shores fabricated here by a brute
ugly man who will never see the
hosannahs of day, much less the
beloved I dream. Each night my day’s
labors are sent down an oubliette
to plunge in the vat of acids
which tears me apart, limb from
bloody limb, to know the depths of
desire and God, where seven bright
swords steadily rise and fall,
gashing and dismembering and
setting me at last free. When I wake
there is no trace of blood on my lips,
only the faint salt staining the last
gossamer of fast-fading dream. -- What
wildness, what awfulness, what tender
perfection was there in that room?
I wonder, as I drag my ass out of bed
in the dark and stumble on down here
to stroke up the day fires and
do it all over again.

***

ORAN'S VOYAGE TO THE NORTH

It is commonly said that the People of the Sìdhe dwell within the hills, or in the underworld. In some of the isles their home, now, is spoken of as Tir-na-thonn, the Land of the Wave, or Tir-fo-Tuinn, the Land under the Sea.

But from a friend, an Islander of Iona, I have learned many things, and among them, that the Shee no longer dwell within the inland hills, and that though many of them inhabit the lonelier isles of the west, and in particular The Seven Hunters, their Kingdom is in the North.

Some say it is among the pathless mountains of Iceland. But my friend spoke to an Iceland man, and he said he had never seen them. There were Secret People there, but not the Gaelic Sìdhe.

Their Kingdom is in the North, under the Fir-Chlisneach, the Dancing Men, as the Hebrideans call the polar aurora. They are always young there. Their bodies are white as the wild swan, their hair yellow as honey, their eyes blue as ice. Their feet leave no mark on the snow. The women are white as milk, with eyes like sloes, and lips like red rowans. They fight with shadows, and are glad; but the shadows are not shadows to them. The Shee slay great numbers at the full moon, but never hunt on moonless nights, or at the rising of the moon, or when the dew is falling. Their lances are made of reeds that glitter like shafts of ice, and it is ill for a mortal to find one of these lances, for it is tipped with the salt of a wave that no living thing has touched, neither the wailing mew nor the finned sgAdan nor his tribe, nor the narwhal. There are no men of the human clans there, and no shores, and the tides are forbidden.

Long ago one of the monks of Columba sailed there. He sailed for thrice seven days till he lost the rocks of the north; and for thrice thirty days, till Iceland in the south was like a small bluebell in a great grey plain; and for thrice three years among bergs. For the first three years the finned things of the sea brought him food; for the second three years he knew the kindness of the creatures of the air; in the last three years angels fed him. He lived among the Sidhe for three hundred years. When he came back to Iona, he was asked where he had been all that long night since evensong to matins. The monks had sought him everywhere, and at dawn had found him lying in the hollow of the long wave that washes Iona on the north. He laughed at that, and said he had been on the tops of the billows for nine years and three months and twenty-one days, and for three hundred years had lived among a deathless people. He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every day had known love among flowers and green bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit strange fires, and at the full of the moon had gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, there, under the Lights of the North. When he was asked how that people might be known, he said that away from there they had a cold, cold hand, a cold, still voice, and cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at the four ends of the green diamond that is the world. That in the north was made of earth; that in the east, of air; that in the south, of fire; that in the west, of water. In the middle of the green diamond that is the world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is in the shape of a heart, and glows like a ruby, though all stones and gems are there. It is there the Sìdhe go to refresh their deathless life.

The holy monks said that this kingdom was certainly Ifurin, the Gaelic Hell. So they put their comrade alive in a grave in the sand, and stamped the sand down upon his head, and sang hymns so that mayhap even yet his soul might be saved, or, at least, that when he went back to that place he might remember other songs than those sung by the milk-white women with eyes like sloes and lips red as rowans. "Tell that honey-mouthed cruel people they are in Hell," said the abbot, and give them my ban and my curse unless they will cease laughing and loving sinfully and slaying with bright lances, and will come out of their secret places and be baptized."

They have not yet come.

This adventurer of the dreaming mind is another Oran, that fabulous Oran of whom the later Columban legends tell. I think that other Orans go out, even yet, to the Country of the Sidhe. But few come again. It must be hard to find that glen at the heart of the green diamond that is the world; but, when found, harder to return by the way one came.

-- From Iona, Fiona McCleod (William Sharp), London: William Heinemann, 1912




When Fiona McLeod (screen name of William Sharp) declares Oran "the adventure of the dreaming mind," he could as well be talking about poetry. (Remember, Columba was a poet, so his story -- the dayside version of history which remains -- had a dark vatic underside). Poetic craft is strange work in the dark, emulating Oran’s skull-boat peramble into the weird northern lights of the preter- sub- hypo- hypno-conscious: to sing of that dark light, fantastically nippled polymorphous perverse.

The post-Jungian analyst James Hillman in "Dream and Underworld" approaches the therapeutic task of dream work as beyond hermaneusis; that is, its work is a mimesis of depth-play. Anyway, psychoanalysis is in the well but it is not the task. Substitute "poetry" for "dream" in the following, and you have your hands on the rope which pulls up these daily buckets I call Wick-Lit:

"What we take out of dreams, what we get to use from dreams, what we bring up from dreams, is all to the surface. Depth is the invisible connection; and it is in working with our hands on the invisible connections where we cannot see, deep in the body of the night, penetrating, assembling and differentiating, debriding, stirring, churning, kneading -- this constitutes the work on dreams. Always we are doing precision work, but with invisibilities, with ambiguities, and with moving materials."



Oran's underworld, underwater travels and travails speak of a questing spirit transformed by its travels. Would you volunteer to descend through the footers of a cathedral, down to the bone loam of prehistory, down to the abyssal plains where all settles and is eventually lost?

And know that what falls there comes back in spades, richer and wilder and freer than a waking man could imagine. In her absolutely wet and magnificent The Sea Around Us,, Rachel Carson writes about the phenomenon of upwelling, when cold water surges to the surface:

“The conflict between opposing water masses may, in places, be one of the most dramatic of the ocean's phenomena. Superficial hissings and sighings, the striping of the surface waters with lines of froth, a confused turbulence and boiling, and even sounds like distant breakers accompany the displacement of the surface layers by deep water. As visible evidence of the upward movement of the water masses, some of the creatures that inhabit the deeper places of the sea may be carried up bodily into the surface, there to set off orgies of devouring and being devoured such as Robert Cushman Murphy witnessed one night off the coast of Colombia from the schooner Askoy.

“The night had been still and dark, but the behavior of the surface made it clear that deep water was rising and that some sort of conflict was in progress among opposing water masses far below the ship. All about the schooner small, steep waves leaped into being and dissolved in foaming whitecaps, pricked with the blue fire of luminescent organisms. Suddenly,

‘On either side, and at a bafflingly uncertain distance from the ship, a dark line, like a wall of advancing water, seemed to be closing in upon us ... We could hear the splash and murmur of a troubled surface close by ... Presently we could see a gleam of foam sprinkled with points of luminescence on the slowly approaching swell or head to the left. Vague and unfounded thoughts of marine earthquake bores occurred to Fallon and me together, and we felt peculiarly helpless with a dismantled engine and no breeze to make the craft answer her helm. The dreamlike slowness of all that was going on, moreover, gave me a feeling that I bad not yet fully shaken off the bonds of three hours' slumber.

“‘However, when the dark, white-outlined menace reached us, it proved to be nothing more than a field of the dancing water, tossing its little peaks a mere foot or so into the air and beating a tattoo on the steel flanks of ‘Askoy’ . . .

"’Presently a sharp hissing sound, different in character from the bursting of small waves, came out of the darkness to starboard, and this was followed by strange sighings and puffings ... The puffers were blackfish, many scores, or perhaps hundreds of them, rolling and lumbering along and diving to pass beneath ‘Askoy’ shortly before they reached her bilge . . . We could hear the bacchanalian clamor of their rumblings and belchings. In the long beam of the searchlight, the hissing proved to come from the jumping of small fishes. In all directions as far as the light carried, they were shooting into the air and pouring down like hail ...

“‘The surface was seething, boiling with life, much of which was de profundis. Larvae of clawless lobsters, tinted jellyfish, nurse chains of salps, small herringlike fishes, a silvery hatchetfish with its face bitten off, rudder fishes, hanging head downward, luminous lantern-fishes with shining light pores, red and purple swimming crabs, other creatures which we could not name at sight and much that was too small even to see distinctly . . .

“‘A general holocaust was in progress. The little fishes were eating invertebrates or straining out the plankton; the squids were pursuing and capturing fish of various sizes; and the blackfisb were no doubt enjoying the squids ...

“‘As the night wore on, the amazing manifestations of abundance and devouring gradually, almost imperceptibly, died away. Eventually, ‘Askoy’ lay once more in water that seemed as still and dead as oil, and the lap-lap of skipping waves drew off farther and farther into the distance until it was lost.'”

(Carson cites from "Natural History," VOI. Lin, no. 8, 1944, p. 356l; her pp. 145-6)

Ah dark and cold and abysmally wild, that region just offshore this day: here it is still and humid once again, witched by far Wilma who has yet to turn herself our way, battening now on the Yucatan Peninusla, her most distant tresses clouding overhead with that snakelike whirl and writhe. No one may fully look her in the face, so large that dark visage: instead we measure her affect in storm-surge, rainfall accumulation, insurance losses. The image of a soaked cat crying mournfully from a ravaged tree. Ah too deep and wild is nature’s black nurture for us to harbor in our hearts, these savageries of storm and tsunami and earthquake harrow thin the brain, make us needy and naughty, seeking paps of some avail.

No: the big stuff is not meant for us: the metaphor as yet ends there, before the cracks of doom: Such wildness snuffs the imagination, bewitches psyche, rendering us fools of old liturgy, proclaiming the End of Time, our eyes fast to television sets. The swastika of these events turns wide as continents from over and below, cyclonic and Scyllic, amping the pulse of compulsion, giving drunks their greedy throats. We thus turn to the wall and die.

No: my wild, my wave-wooly, my dark demesne sets herms along that borderline which outborders the wet work of psyche in soul, the task I now call Wick-Lit. These matin upwellings map a world for words, inking dragons beyond the depth and breadth of them, keeping these coracles within the marge and margins of the sayable unsaid, the knowable unknowns.

Oh and how much room there is to find there, here at 5 a.m., absolutely wearied from a hard week of work, my wife with hot flashes in her sleep of great worry, small flutings of breeze the most distant feathers of the black angel stirring up to the west ....Huge surgencies of the blackest phoshor, lamped with the world’s first fire, curved with bottomless desire, loud in all creation’s choir ...

“Man’s descent to the water is needed to evoke the miracle of its coming to life. But the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know -- since it is not ourselves. It hints at an unseen presence, a numen which neither human expectations nor the machinations of the will have given life. It lives of itself, and a shudder runs through the man who thought that "spirit" was merely what he believes, what he makes of himself, what is said in books, or what people talk about. But when it happens it is a spookish thing, and primitive fear seizes the naive mind ...

“.. We must surely go the way of the waters, which always trend downward, if we would raise up the treasure, the precious inheritance of the father. In the Gnostic hymn to the soul, the son is sent forth by his parents to seek the pearl that fell from the king’s crown. It lies at the bottom of a deep well, guarded by a dragon, in the land of the Egyptians -- that land of fleshpots and drunkenness with all its material and spiritual riches. The son sets out to fetch the jewel, but forgets himself and his task in the orgies of Egyptian worldliness, until a letter from his father reminds him of what his duty is. He then sets out for the water and plunges into the dark depths of the well, where he finds the pearl at the bottom, and in the end offers it to the highest divinity.”

-- Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW9, pars. 35, 37
___

Poem and dream, word for dark worlds: ferryman and that infernal freight, mutually tasked to sing what Oran found down there in the dream of St. Columba ...


THE DAZZLING DARK

2002

If it blazes, it has worth.
— Rilke

There is a God (some say),
A deep,but dazzling darkness.

— Henry Vaughan

The upwelling sea carries
in its cold hands a
rich mineral haul,
deep pearls and gems
beyond all price.
That gleaming wealth
was minted in darkness
and ice, from compressions
greater than the sky
over the sea, greater
than father on mother,
the weight of ages
and old certainties
which never die,
just descent to lower ones.
Down where we can’t
see we know things
which ghostlike glow
in a hell of near-forgotten
myths and deaths—ensoulings
which dart and linger
in the cracks of doom.
The sea lifts these in
its long currents,
carrying them up to shore—
an island close to the
equator, say—there
penguins sport near
palm trees and huge
seafowl batten on the
mineral-enriched flesh
of glowing fish. What
the birds deposit in
huge guano hills could
nourish a continent
of corn: such is what
ferries up from the
darkest places, the
most cold. I must trust
haulings such as this;
a bone poem hooked from
the abyssal heap has
its own fire, mineral
and glittery as Moby’s eye,
surely not ours to keep,
no family jewel, not
even a totem sire,
unfit for anthology:
rather this poem is
the wave which
carries a book
discarded long ago,
a seal-breviary
embedded with hoary
gems and inscribed
with squid inks
by hands long vanished.
"There’s a divinity
that shapes our ends,
hew them how we will,"*—
the wave is deeper than any
I tried to swive or swill,
richer than your heaven’s till.

* Hamlet vii 9-10




CAPE OF DEEPER DREAMS

2005

My dreams are more random
now, faded harps my angels
used to play for me in
brilliant strolling waves of blue
fret and ache and bluster.
Now I frequently dream in verse,
the angle of the descent and
discourse with shades pure
glossalalia, my inside tongue
all eyes and mouth. I know I’m
dreaming because I wake
ravished by a genius I can
only remember the sound of,
like a murmuring of a surf
beyond day-brightened dunes.
I wonder if I’ve voyaged
beyond one sort of dream
into its wilder terrain, a thrall
of sound whose sense is
aural, product perhaps of
all this listening and writing
each wave down. So when
I dream in the older way
I try to pay attention
in the old-school ways.
Last night I dreamed I was
sober no more, or was bent
on that ravishment, perambling
old bars of a lost great city,
each bar a tap assembled
from all the ones I drank
through for too many years.
Only I was walking bar to
bar in search not of booze or
even pussy, but rather
their salt integument,
trying to find a way to
enter and find a stool
that was right for the thirst
inside the old unslakable
greed; for James Bond-like
entries, all eyes on
me, violins sawing tense
and gorgeous lower
tones about my feet like
water, and ahead beneath
a single lamp the barstool
assigned to me by God
and a perfectly poured
martini on the bar,
gleaming a glacial, hard
blue undertow to all
I’ve since built over.
First it was a hotel
bar at 5 a.m., or several
of them in one swank
complex -- a convention
center perhaps -- the work
day’s furies still fresh
in me and the first drink
of happy hour after years
without fraught enough
to require the right bar,
stool, bartender, crowd,
first drink, I dunno, but
such angst wove me through
two or three without tasting
booze. None was quite right,
the sought for god missing
on his shore, the one-night
stand sleeping naked next
to me in the ghastly
hour of first light so wrong
I couldn’t wait to leave,
wrong for all the reasons
that sent me toward
the beacon of all wrongness
burning in the night.
And so I left that place
and ventured out into
a spring-seeming night
of city neon and hoary air
not winter any more
but far from summer,
a dewy fragrance hanging
in the eaves of stores
I walked under, like
some promised or
forever lost perfume,
as I made my ghost
peramble through all
the old, toothy bars.
I entered a dark
pool hall where I stood
next to the bar waiting
for a Budweiser and
wondering if I should
stay to romance
the barmaid, a conflicted
pretty-but-worn gal
in tight jeans and a
white t-shirt which
suggested weary, over-
weaning breasts which
were sore from nursing
too many men like me,
boys who’d gained
an appetite for their
long-lost mothers’
nipples. But in the
press of that hour
too many jerks were
jostling at the bar,
waving fivers like
fins of a school
of boy-men on a field
trip to salt’s breasty
planetarium where every
heavenly body is put
on view. -- So I got
outta there and walked
cooled midnight streets
wondering where next
to go to slake my riven
needs, scanning through
my faulty memory a
rolodex of eateries
and nightclubs, bars
of every stripe -- not
to rock at the Aquarius
Tavern in Spokane or CBGB
in New York City or Fern
Park Station in Orlando
where all the bands I
never got to play in rocked
the rafters and then died.
Not to dance at JJ Whispers
or Park Avenue amid
disco divas and New Wave
wastrels who danced
like Sufis of bad flame,
whirls I could not drink
to any sufficient depth.
Then I recalled some
restaurant bars of long
ago a few streets over
that had a certain,
Scotch-ambered glow,
a possibility of drinking
and receiving what
the pickled half of my
heart will always dream
of in its desire for
the perfect buzz, for
drink without the
drunkenness and love
in endless bloom: a
tipsy free-fall through downy
rooms where all the
women know my name
and trade it guilelessly
from night to bed to night
to bed, hosannah and amen.
And so I ventured out
toward streets I barely
recalled, stretching a long
night out still further to
its remotest periphery
close to dawn, that hazy
edge of blackout and
deep sleep inside the bottle
of a body I never quite
could find. I peeped an
eyelid open to find our
bedroom washed pale blue
by a hot moon hanging
in the western windows,
a migraine gonging in
my skull, our cat scrambling
around the room, trying
to rouse me downstairs
to feed her treats. Sometimes
a dream allows my Cape
blue folds, plashes of old
angst and vitreous desire
which no one may hold
as they boat through.
The sound of those
lost years is both revenant
and resonant, a vintage of
naked peramble for
which these words are
scat and scrabble.
Cape of my wrecked
hopes for perfect booze,
horned Cape of waters
deeper than old dreams:
Narrow down for me
what passed through with
me on those nights
of wild blue screams.
Name for me the totem
which redeems or
at least most loudly
scream that history.

A Tale of Two Dreams

Creative work is bucket work, pulling up well-buckets of the coldest oldest sea-water and flinging that wild water with every defiant synapse to enrage and enthrall the hearted mind. Old sources ennervate new songs.

Joseph Campbell concludes in book Creative Mythology thus:

“The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of ‘elementary ideas” (marga) than of the ‘ethnic’, recognized as in the Domitilla Ceiling, through an intelligent ‘making us’ not of one mythology only but of all the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building ‘yes because’ may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart his amor; the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, ‘thus come.’ And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of ‘meaning,’ and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within.” (677-8)

Yes: Campbell’s masterwork pairs the vitality of the deep noctal tradition of amor with the even wilder possibility of much deeper realms yet to be discovered and named by the next creator. This is such defiance of standard literary theory which sees creators today exhausted by their pasts, unable to say more than has been said. It is I think the essence of what Keats was able to do, finding not burden but a great empowering welcome in those sources, old agencies greeting new surgencies, the next creation that wild upwelling which says “your work is our work and our work is your work.”

In the spirit of that, I offer two creations built around a dream -- one old, one new -- both tasked to create some cathedral-like resonance around what a dream first belled.

The first is from The Mabinogion, where many of the pre-literate stories of the Celtic heritage found their way into print.


THE DREAM OF MAXEN WLEDIG

from The Mabinogion, transl. Lady Charlotte Guest)


MAXEN WLEDIG was emperor of Rome, and he was a comelier man, and a better and a wiser than any emperor that had been before him. And one day he held a council of kings, and he said to his friends, "I desire to go to-morrow to hunt." And the next day in the morning he set forth with his retinue, and came to the valley of the river that flowed towards Rome. And he hunted through the valley until mid-day. And with him also were two-and-thirty crowned kings, that were his vassals; not for the delight of hunting went the emperor with them, but to put himself on equal terms with those kings.

And the sun was high in the sky over their heads, and the heat was great. And sleep came upon Maxen Wledig. And his attendants stood and set up their shields around him upon the shafts of their spears to protect him from the sun, and they placed a gold enamelled shield under his head; and so Maxen slept.

And he saw a dream. And this is the dream that he saw. He was journeying along the valley of the river towards its source; and he came to the highest mountain in the world. And he thought that the mountain was as high as the sky; and when he came over the mountain, it seemed to him that he went through the fairest and most level regions that man ever yet beheld, on the other side of the mountain. And he saw large and mighty rivers descending from the mountain to the sea, and towards the mouths of the rivers he proceeded. And as he journeyed thus, he came to the mouth of the largest river ever seen. And he beheld a great city at the entrance of the river, and a vast castle in the city, and he saw many high towers of various colours in the castle. And he saw a fleet at the mouth of the river, the largest ever seen. And he saw one ship among the fleet; larger was it by far, and fairer than all the others. Of such part of the ship as he could see above the water, one plank was gilded and the other silvered over. He saw a bridge of the bone of the whale from the ship to the land, and. he thought that he went along the bridge, and came into the ship. And a sail was hoisted on the ship, and along the sea and the ocean was it borne. Then it seemed that he came to the fairest island in the whole world, and he traversed the island from sea to sea, even to the furthest shore of the island. Valleys he saw, and steeps and rocks of wondrous height, and rugged precipices. Never yet saw he the like. And thence he beheld an island in the sea, facing this rugged land. And between him and this island was a country of which the plain was as large as the sea, the mountain as vast as the wood. And from the mountain he saw a river that flowed through the land and fell into the sea. And at the mouth of the river he beheld a castle, the fairest that man ever saw, and the gate of the castle was open, and he went into the castle. And in the castle he saw a fair hall, of which the roof seemed to be all gold, the walls of the hall seemed to be entirely of glittering precious gems, the doors all seemed to be of gold. Golden seats he saw in the hall, and silver tables. And on a seat opposite to him, he beheld two auburn-haired youths playing at chess. He saw a silver board for the chess, and golden pieces thereon. The garments of the youths were of jet black satin, and chaplets of ruddy gold bound their hair, whereon were sparkling jewels of great price, rubies, and gems, alternately with imperial stones. Buskins of new cordovan leather on their feet, fastened by slides of red gold.

And beside a pillar in the hall, he saw a hoary-headed man, in a chair of ivory, with the figures of two eagles of ruddy gold thereon. Bracelets of gold were upon his arms, and many rings were on his hands, and a golden torque about his neck; and his hair was bound with a golden diadem. He was of powerful aspect. A chess-board of gold was before him, and a rod of gold, and a steel file in his hand. And he was carving out chess-men.

And he saw a maiden sitting before him in a chair of ruddy gold. Not more easy than to gaze upon the sun when brightest, was it to look upon her by reason of her beauty. A vest of white silk was upon the maiden, with clasps of red gold at the breast; and a surcoat of gold tissue upon her, and a frontlet of red gold upon her head, and rubies and gems were in the frontlet, alternating with pearls and imperial stones. And a girdle of ruddy gold was around her. She was the fairest sight that man ever beheld.

The maiden arose from her chair before him, and he threw his arms about the neck of the maiden, and they two sat down together in the chair of gold: and the chair was not less roomy for them both, than for the maiden alone. And as he had his arms about the maiden's neck, and his cheek by her cheek, behold, through the chafing of the dogs at their leashing, and the clashing of the shields as they struck against each other, and the beating together of the shafts of the spears, and the neighing of the horses and their prancing, the emperor awoke.

And when he awoke, nor spirit nor existence was left him, because of the maiden whom he had seen in his sleep, for the love of the maiden pervaded his whole frame. Then his household spake unto him. "Lord," said they, "is it not past the time for thee to take thy food?" Thereupon the emperor mounted his palfrey, the saddest man that mortal ever saw, and went forth towards Rome.

And thus he was during the space of a week. When they of the household went to drink wine and mead out of golden vessels, he went not with any of them. When they went to listen to songs and tales, he went not with them there; neither could he be persuaded to do any thing but sleep. And as often as he slept, he beheld in his dreams the maiden he loved best; but except when he slept he saw nothing of her, for he knew not where in the world she was.

***

One day the page of the chamber spake unto him; now, although he was page of the chamber, he was king of the Romans. "Lord," said he, "all the people revile thee." "Wherefore do they revile me?" asked the emperor. "Because they can get neither message nor answer from thee as men should have from their lord. This is the cause why thou art spoken evil of." "Youth," said the emperor, "do thou bring unto me the wise men of Rome, and I will tell them wherefore I am sorrowful."

Then the wise men of Rome were brought to the emperor, and he spake to them. "Sages of Rome," said he, "I have seen a dream. And in the dream I beheld a maiden, and because of the maiden is there neither life, nor spirit, nor existence within me." "Lord," they answered, "since thou judgest us worthy to counsel thee, we will give thee counsel. And this is our counsel; that thou send messengers for three years to the three parts of the world, to seek for thy dream. And as thou knowest not what day or what night good news may come to thee, the hope thereof will support thee."

So the messengers journeyed for the space of a year, wandering about the world, and seeking tidings concerning his dream. But when they came back at the end of the year, they knew not one word more than they did the day they set forth. And then was the emperor exceeding sorrowful, for he thought that he should never have tidings of her whom best he loved.

Then spoke the king of the Romans unto the emperor. "Lord," said he, "go forth to hunt by the way thou didst seem to go, whether it were to the east, or to the west." So the emperor went forth to the hunt, and he came to the bank of the river. "Behold," said he, "this is where I was when I saw the dream, and I went towards the source of the river westward."

And thereupon thirteen messengers of the emperor's set forth, and before them they saw a high mountain, which seemed to them to touch the sky. Now this was the guise in which the messengers journeyed; one sleeve was on the cap of each of them in front, as a sign that they were messengers, in order that through what hostile land soever they might pass no harm might be done them. And when they were come over this mountain, they beheld vast plains, and large rivers flowing there through. "Behold," said they, "the land which our master saw."

And they went along the mouths of the rivers, until they came to the mighty river which they saw flowing to the sea, and the vast city, and the many-coloured high towers in the castle. They saw the largest fleet in the world, in the harbour of the river, and one ship that was larger than any of the others. "Behold again," said they, "the dream that our master saw." And in the great ship they crossed the sea, and came to the Island of Britain. And they traversed the island until they came to Snowdon. "Behold," said they, "the rugged land that our master saw." And they went forward until they saw Anglesey before them, and until they saw Arvon likewise. "Behold," said they, "the land our master saw in his sleep." And they saw Aber Sain, and a castle at the mouth of the river. The portal of the castle saw they open, and into the castle they went, and they saw a hall in the castle. Then said they, "Behold, the hall which he saw in his sleep." They went into the hall, and they behelcl two youths playing at chess on the golden bench. And they beheld the hoary-headed man beside the pillar, in the ivory chair, carving chessmen. And they beheld the maiden sitting on a chair of ruddy gold.

The messengers bent down upon their knees. "Empress of Rome, all hail! Ha, gentles," said the maiden, "ye bear the seeming of honourable men, and the badge of envoys, what mockery is this ye do to me?" "We mock thee not, lady; but the Emperor of Rome hath seen thee in his sleep, and he has neither life nor spirit left because of thee. Thou shalt have of us therefore the choice, lady, whether thou wilt go with us and be made empress of Rome, or that the emperor come hither and take thee for his wife?" "Ha, lords," said the maiden, "I will not deny what ye say, neither will I believe it too well. If the emperor love me, let him come here to seek me."

And by day and night the messengers hied them back. And when their horses failed, they bought other fresh ones. And when they came to Rome, they saluted the Emperor, and asked their boon, which was given to them according as they named it. "We will be thy guides, lord," said they, "over sea and over land., to the place where is the woman whom best thou lovest, for we know her name, and her kindred, and her race.


And immediately the emperor set forth with his army. And these men were his guides. Towards the Island of Britain they went over the sea and the deep. And he conquered the Island from Beli the son of Manogan, and his sons, and drove them to the sea, and went forward even unto Arvon. And the emperor knew the land when he saw it. And when he beheld the castle of Aber Sain, "Look yonder," said he, "there is the castle wherein I saw the damsel whom I best love." And he went forward into the castle and into the hall, and there he saw Kynan the son of Eudav, and Adeon the son of Eudav, playing at chess. And he saw Eudav the son of Caradawc, sitting on a chair of ivory carving chessmen. And the maiden whom he had beheld in his sleep, he saw sitting on a chair of gold. "Empress of Rome," said he, "all hail!" And the emperor threw his arms about her neck; and that night she became his bride.

And the next day in the morning, the damsel asked her maiden portion. And he told her to name what she would. And she asked to have the Island of Britain for her father, from the Channel to the Irish Sea, together with the three adjacent Islands, to hold under the empress of Rome; and to have three chief castles made for her, in whatever places she might choose in the Island of Britain. And she chose to have the highest castle made at Arvon. And they brought thither earth from Rome that it might be more healthful for the emperor to sleep, and sit, and walk upon. After that the two other castles were made for her, which were Caerlleon and Caermarthen.

And one day the emperor went to hunt at Caermarthen, and he came so far as the top of Brevi Vawr, and there the emperor pitched his tent. And that encamping place is called Cadeir Maxen, even to this day. And because that he built the castle with a myriad of men, he called it Caervyrddin. Then Helen bethought her to make high roads from one castle to another throughout the Island of Britain. And the roads were made. And for this cause are they called the roads of Helen Luyddawc, that she was sprung from a native of this island, and the men of the Island of Britain would not have made these great roads for any save for her.

Seven years did the emperor tarry in this Island. Now, at that time, the men of Rome had a custom, that whatsoever emperor should remain in other lands more than seven years, should remain to his own overthrow, and should never return to Rome again.

So they made a new emperor. And this one wrote a letter of threat to Maxen. There was nought in the letter but only this. "If thou comest, and if thou ever comest to Rome." And even unto Caerlleon came this letter to Maxen, and these tidings. Then sent he a letter to the man who styled himself emperor in Rome. There was nought in that letter also but only this. "If I come to Rome, and if I come."

And thereupon Maxen set forth towards Rome with his army, and vanquished France and Burgundy, and every land on the way, and sat down before the city of Rome.

A year was the emperor before the city, and he was no nearer taking it than the first day. And after him there came the brothers of Helen Luyddawc from the Island of Britain, and a small host with them, and better warriors were in that small host than twice as many Romans. And the emperor was told that a host was seen, halting close to his army and encamping, and no man ever saw a fairer or better appointed host for its size, nor more handsome standards.

And Helen went to see the hosts, and she knew the standards of her brothers. Then came Kynan the son of Eudav, and Adeon the son of Eudav, to meet the emperor. And the emperor was glad because of them, and embraced them.

Then they looked at the Romans as they attacked the city. Said Kynan to his brother, "We will try to attack the city more expertly than this." So they measured by night the height of the wall, and they sent their carpenters to the wood, and a ladder was made for every four men of their number. Now when these were ready, every day at mid-day the emperors went to meat, and they ceased to fight on both sides till all had finished eating. And in the morning the men of Britain took their food, and they drank until they were invigorated. And while the two emperors were at meat, the Britons came to the city, and placed their ladders against it, and forthwith they came in through the city.

The new emperor had no time to arm himself when they fell upon him, and slew him, and many others with him. And three nights and three days were they subduing the men that were in the city and taking the castle. And others of them kept the city, lest any of the host of Maxen should come therein, until they had subjected all to their will.

Then spake Maxen to Helen Luyddawc. "I marvel, lady," said he, "that thy brothers have not conquered this city for me." "Lord, emperor," she answered, "the wisest youths in the world are my brothers. Go thou thither and ask the city of them, and if it be in their possession thou shalt have it gladly." So the emperor and Helen went and demanded the city. And they told the emperor that none had taken the city, and that none could give it him, but the men of the Island of Britain. Then the gates of the city of Rome were opened, and the emperor sat on the throne, and all the men of Rome submitted themselves unto him. The emperor then said unto Kynan and Adeon, "Lords," said he, "I have now had possession of the whole of my empire. This host give I unto you to vanquish whatever region ye may desire in the world."

So they set forth and conquered lands, and castles, and cities. And they slew all the men, but the women they kept alive. And thus they continued until the young men that had come with them were grown grey-beaded, from the length of time they were upon this conquest.

Then spoke Kynan unto Adeon his brother, "Whether wilt thou rather," said he, "tarry in this land, or go back into the land whence thou didst come forth?" Now he chose to go back to his own land, and many with him. But Kynan tarried there with the other part and dwelt there.

And they took counsel and cut out the tongues of the women, lest they should corrupt their speech. And because of the silence of the women from their own speech, the men of Armorica are called Britons. From that time there came frequently, and still comes, that language from the Island of Britain.

And this dream is called the Dream of Maxen Wledig, emperor of Rome.




ORANGE BLOSSOM
TRAIL 10: HERM OF DREAMS

August 2004
(a few weeks before Hurricane Charley)

In my dream I plod
a long ways up the Trail
on a bicycle towards
the City with this
huge reverence for
revenance, the night’s
spoor of blue wild.
Whitesnake’s “The
Thrill of the Night”
rising from the throat
of the road (black
as a whale’s nadiring
gullet). Slowly as
I pedal (the torturous
motion is important --
no speed, no ease,
no downward drafting
here), the particulars
take shape by the
blackened trough,
like ghosts for blood:
gas stations & convenience
stores, McDonalds,
Jiffy Lubes, all of them
shuttered and dark at
this vampire-caped
a.m., later than
my worst nocturne,
rich in the jugular
of my wildest blackout.
Then I come to my
favorite rock n roll
club, only here on
the dream’s Trail
it’s some aristocratic
manor, multi-leveled,
Gothic, red-carpeted,
chandeliers of crystal
everywhere, and the
rooms are filled with
stylish people from some
other age, their high-
throated velvet gowns
and black tuxedos
concealing a black
thirst like no other.
There’s a monster
elevator at the back
that takes me far
far down into some
evil labyrinth where a
a woman I used
to know is desperate
to get out. I try to
find her, encountering
a instead this phalanx
of evil scientists,
slamming doors,
the dread malaise of
certain doom. Perhaps
finding itself narrowed
to that ledge, the
dream pushed me to
some parallel room
where I was in a
theater with
four of my bandmates
watching a sci-fi
horror film; onscreen
five young men were
being fed to a she-
beast in a labyrinth,
their embrace a gnarl
of teeth and hooves
and fading screams.
We watched terrified
as the young men
banged inconsolably
on those blank black
walls of fate; always
just at the rear
in the deepest dark
was revealed the faintest
glint of a stone man’s
face, observing, receiving,
drinking with that
ancient flat gaze -- What’s up
with him? I wondered,
and then suddenly the five of
us were in the film,
running that ruinous
maze which leads
always back to
what you fear and
are the most. Yet
just left of doom
we found a door
leading out into
some prehistoric
jungle, the moon
above us lamping
the faintest of blue
trails which we beat
in steady terror,
always surmising
somewhere just behind
the wild thrash of tusks.
We came to a kiosk
where some nerdy guy
who collected books was
feeding the titles of
books into a computer.
He pointed us to
a different trail and
I found myself alone
hiking up the bed of
the Rio Grande
at the deepest gorge
of this Trail, finding
the hulks of abandoned
Camaros and delivery
vans, even the ribcage of
some aquatic dinosaur
like the topmost ruins
of a drowned cathedral.
Up ahead the City
slowly grew bigger
like dragon teeth
awakening from the
horizon -- then I woke
up, said whew, and later
wrote that damn dream
down. I had it back
in 1987 and I found it
again today, in a book
left on the darker
side of the Trail,
a herm of dreams,
if you will: rites of
passage on that road
you can’t ride or
even walk.

Harper of the Thrall

TROUBADOUR

2004

One kiss forever changed me — not the
First but the one love at last deemed
Me ready for, an hour before
Spring woke the world with urgent green
And torrid rivers. Her song then
Found my mouth and since has never
Ceased babbling of blue skies and rafts
Floating over drowned suburbs and
Churches I once prayed in. Merry
In mind yet desperate of heart,
That music is my sea-horse,
My life from shore to shore. Heaven
Knows where that woman fled to
Affrighted by this strange throat’s roar:
In that slough I sing her soar.

***

TAPESTRY

2004

In my father’s
bastard history
there are harpists
who entertained the
Norman kings in the
south of Ireland: And
when those courts
washed back into
sea, our minstrels
wandered forth, seeking
patronage in whatever
semblance of royalty
that sad country
could provide. A
family singer of the
17th century lamented,
“who will buy a poem?”
and concluded, “I’m
a ship with a ruined
cargo/now the famous
Fitzgeralds are gone./
No answer. A terrible case./
It is all in vain that I ask.”
Surely that is why
one of my fathers
boarded the Sea Sprite in
1779, carrying that
broken harp to
Boston Harbor.
But when were Your
songs ever safe, praising
the rise of kings who
always fell, revelling
in love’s wild delights
beyond the pale of
papal decree and
the prying eyes of
royal husbands? Such
blasphemy and scandal
have always pleased You
well, even if Your
mortal lovers all found
sorrow at the far ends
of their verses. No matter.
All those years I wandered
and blundered learning
how not to drink from
those three cups of song
which festoon my father’s
crest: a delight only to
You. Certainly not for
my mortal loves; nor
even much in my
long education in
singing mortal songs about love.
The rise and fall of
every wave to You
is holy and florid,
no matter how wet
and scraggly my
leaps become in them.
That naked man
astride the mean-
looking dolphin atop
the crest — he’s not
giving up the song.
That’s plain from
the motto — Not by
Providence but Victory! —
which is written under
wall like a labia
buzzing a Bronx cheer
to every noble aim
and their chaste remains.
You love this sweet
cacophony of lost
and lonely songs
forever hitting shores
you’ve just left behind.
Whatever I set to paper
here was lifted from
that sweet air
drifting in from
the absence You hurl,
like perfume, everywhere
you’ve been: A high
strange music which
my lyrics dare complete
or at least ferry to
the next wild shore
flapping in the breeze
like Your dress
just out of sight.
Libraries and chapels
and writing chairs
are just our way
of trying to mount You,
as men build dams
and bulwarks against
the sea. But the music
like a tide is crashing
down the shore
where you are close,
oh, closer than the
margin of a kiss.
You have made of me
a brine-soaked harp
which sings of You
everywhere there’s
moonlight on the strings
and blue dazzle in the springs.

***




October moon’s howl in wane, clear skies clouding, turbidity to the south and west where Wilma whirls ‘n’ turns, rolling pin in hand, eyeing Florida’s long offending member askance with warm-water-roiled spleen. Doofus Fred Flintstone surely is our state father, dozing on the Florida platform amid all that sedimental hubris, aeons of repose, accumulating the detritus of eroding mountains, tourist legions composed of snoozy oolites and snoring granitics, wefts of sleepy limestone and sand, all that’s left of so much wind and wave. As we, current residents of this old weary thrall, sleepwalk through the suburban routines of ecstasy, immune to distant disasters, our Edens lamped by the glow of worried TV weathercasters, tracing an angry red arc of possibiltiy across the state, path of wrath, red on the inside, wild all about ... Thus we prepare for this next hurricane, the fury at the end of one alphabet, muse of the next -- Alpha, Beta, all the Greek titans of storm ...

My wife sleeps upstairs in a caul of increasing worry, back to the doc today and then to Mayo Clinic next week for a second opinion on the likelihood of laproscopy to remove a large cyst on one of her ovaries. It’s always the female wonderworks, she laments, fibroid tumors removed 5 years ago in a hysterectomy (“bigger than three Mr. Potato Heads” was how the doc described them), a suspicious mass on a breast (shadowy and malignant-looking due to a messy mammogram). Now this. I don’t think the surgery will be that difficult, but my wife is grown terrifed of operations, hates the invasiveness of an absolutely other knife, the cold flourescence, the sickly-sour hospital ambience, the nausea and headaches blooming like bad anaesthesia, the off-setting of one’s plans, the sense of starting over again from the centrality of a wound.

Who am I to judge? My job is to finish this writing, clean up, and get back in bed with her, stroking slow and sure her feet, listening, consoling, commiserating, savoring with her a moment with our cat (retrieving Violet from her chair in the closet and then setting her on the bed), cooing, delighting, laughing, listening, sighing, shoring, salving as best as I can with a loving presence alongside her anger and worry ...



CALMING THE MERMAID

The story is told by a John Corley to Lady August Gregory and included in her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, 1920:

There is no luck if you meet a mermaid and you out at sea, but storms will come, or some ill will happen.
There was a ship on the way to America, and a mermaid was seen following it, and the bad weather began to come. And the captain said, “It must be some man in the ship she’s following, and if we knew which one it was, we’d put him out to her and save ourselves.” So they drew lots, and the lot fell on one man, and then the captain was sorry for him, and said he’d give him a chance till tomorrow. And the next day she was following them still, and they drew lots again, and the lot fell on the same man. But the captain said he’d give him a third chance, but the third day the lot fell on him again. And when they were going to throw him out he said, “Let me alone for a while.” And he went to the end of the ship and he began to sing a song in Irish, and when he sang, the mermaid began to be quiet and rock like as if she was alseep. So he went on singing till they came to America, and just as they got to the land the ship was thrown up into the air, and came down on the water again. There’s a man told me that was surely true.

***

St. Julian’s Well, within the precincts of the Austin Friars at Ludlow (Co. Rutland, England), is, I imagine, like St. Julian’s Church, Shewsbury, dedicated in honor of St. Juliana, the virgin martyr of Nocodemia, who was bound and scourged her demon-tempter, but quenched the fire prepared to burn her with her tears, and arose unurt and refreshed from a boiling cauldron, and thus may have been considered a patroness of healing waters.

-- Robert Charles Hope, The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England 1893





If the sea teaches any lesson, it thunders this through the throat of all its winds: “There is no knowledge that is not valuable.”

— Emerson at sea, in his Journal of 1833


***

ONE LOVE, ONE SONG

My love for you and this song
are one in this singular travail
across an empty so gorgeous sea.
Though my ways seem
pathless, I follow my heart
because it alone knows
the way through the
wilderness of waves,
seeing with darker eyes
the deeper path of love,
compassed by that
silver ache the moon
hangs over the tide.
Our love cannot be
requited though
nothing else will do;
on a forever-waylaid
night we’ll merge at last
and dream and drift
off together into an
endless, clear blue space.
No matter all these
quests that failed
to find you. No matter
all the instruments I’ve
blunted in my dowse
and reach for you — penis,
guitar, pen, boat-prow.
No matter this ocean
of ink that grows
between us, filling
the hallows of your
every departure (or
were they all mine?)
with angel-burning tears.
All that matters is
the pure note welling
in my throat with
clarion and halcyon
desire, lofted over that
crystal thalassa like
a breast of pale blue milk
or the lucence of that
afterglow which brimmed
a few beds on a few
nights along this lifelong
row to you. I’m just
another luckless troubadour
marked from birth to
ache and sing to you,
my lady of royal blue seem.
Perchance today I
sing well enough of you
to stir you from your dream.
Smile for me just once
on whatever shore you
now walk. Bless these
penny verses with with
glint of your pure silver.
Kiss me once just over
the crest of the wave
I send to you from
the bottom of this art.

Tangled Up In Blue(s)

BLUE IN BLUE

Oct 19 2005

Out the hall window
at 2 a.m. my car blares
silver blue and black
in full moonlight.
Wild light bulbs that
midnight blue; the two
are icy blondes writhing
cheek to cheek over the
abyssal mother of all moons,
blueblack and cooing
wave surges toward this shore.
My bluest fantasy
disappears into sex
the way sex fades
into something roaring forward,
a tide maybe, or an age
both newer and older than
any reckoning by saner,
drier, sated Dons. Blonde on
blonde I’m tangled up in
blue in a syzygy of sames,
moon and sea like
heart and sight like singer
and psalm and all halves of
bone in parting delight,
the one melting forever
out of sight, the lucent
gleam of all that remains.
My car in vast moonlight
takes me to a shore
where savage waves pound
wondrous grains now pouring
ineluctably from the window
glass, like a naked woman
walking out a door which closes
in a silver roar of collapsing
wild blue foam. And her eyes
which caught and held me
one in that so pregnant dark --
so blue and silvery with
desire for my blueballed streams,
amid a dark which nailed me
forever to a blueblack tree
of arching fire, evanescent now,
haunting, free, bone on bone
now dreaming of silver’s swoon
in blue, reflecting every sea
which delved the ache and
arch of me to you.




James Hillman in his essay "Blue" writes about an alchemical movement of the imagination he terms "blue" -- a motion which bears much of the ocean of Oran’s down- in- under- cold- blue- Well — a motion equally shared with the poem and the lover’s reckless plunge --:


The transit from black to white via blue implies that blue always brings black with it. ... Blue bears traces of the mortificatio into the whitening. What before was the stickiness of the black, like pitch or tar, unable to be rid of, turns into the traditionally blue virtues of constancy and fidelity. The same dark events feel different.

As even the darkest blue is not black, so even the deepest depression is not the mortificatio which means death of soul. The mortificatio is a time of symptoms. These inexplicable, utterly materialized tortures of psyche in physis are relieved, according to the procession of colors, by a movement toward depression, which can commence as a mournful regret even over the lost symptom: “It was better when it hurt physically -- now I only cry.” Blue misery.

So, with the appearance of blue, feeling becomes more paramount and the paramount feeling is the mournful plaint (Rimbaud equates blue with the vowel “O”; Kadinsky with the sounds of the flute, cello, double bass and organ). These laments hint of soul, of reflecting and distancing by imaginational expression. Here we can see more why archetypal psychology has stressed depression as the via regia in soul-making. The ascetic exercises that we call symptoms (and their treatments), the guilty despairs and remorse as the nigredo decays, reduce the old ego-personality, but this necessary reduction is only preparatory to the sense of soul which appears first in the blued imagination of depression.




BLUE NOIR

2004

Each day I mount this
pale white writing chair
and comment my verbal
self to waters wild and wide
with no oar nor paddle
or compass or sail.
This pen voyages where
you bid, or where I
fancy you remain as
I shut my eyes and
recall a trace of you.
Today I think of the night
I followed a busty
redhead home after
the bar closed down
in the year when I
had left my wife behind
and made my way
back home. Let’s color
that singular night blue
noir, its saxophones
sexual and evil,
transgressing what I
knew was wrong
and flinging myself anyway
in the name of revels
I could neither submit
to without a wedding ring
tight around my heart,
nor resist as any
more sober man might
have. We drank burgundy
a while in that monied
professional apartment
and then she left to
go pee, leaving me alone
to stare out at the
streetlamped night
of 3 a.m., into that
maw of lost darkness
in the belly of the
whale. Everything
thick with drunkenness
and fatigue, Joe
Jackson on the stereo
& the door not far away.
So much in me still
demanding that I just
get up and go but then
she came out of
the loo wearing just a
half-buttoned shirt,
her huge breasts swaying
darkly in and down.
The embrace that soon
followed was like a boat
offshore at last on waters
profoundly deep and
wild. Oh how we went
out in the pure salt
of abandon, this way then
that, never fucking --
I didn’t have condom --
but going at it every
other way. Exhausted
spent & glistening with
all our expended oils,
we unclenched around
5:30 a.m. when she
told me I had to go
(she needed to write
a paper the next day).
And so I got zipped
and shod and kissed
her on the cheek as
she slept quenched
and sated, never to speak
to me again. I drove carefully
and raggedly back to
my mother’s house where
I was sleeping in a spare
room, aware at once
of such keen delight
amid the ruin of real love.
My wife in our house
20 miles away alone
in our queen-sized bed
with our cat curled
nearby, she believing
that I was gone for
good. A few months
later I told her I wanted
to come back, to somehow
find a way home.
A year later I moved
back home, sober,
sobered, all my errancies
named and laid at the
altar of a love
that promised nothing
but the love. It was
an evil voyage into
that blue noir night:
hurtful and expensive
& damn near ending
all the poems that I’d
yet to write. But god
the satisfaction of just
reaching into that
gal’s unbuttoned blouse,
to clasp and hold those
huge warm breasts.
How good that evil,
how warm that demon
spray at the the shore
I pray never to return
to nor ever fully forget.
My song here is pure
in the second sense of
things, not orderly
or moral but complete
as the sea is full
of angels with big
teeth. Whatever
shore I ache and
dream here, the
sea gods intend
their own beach.
In the spectrum
of my love there’s
a blue-black isle
washed in booze.
The ink that
flows from my
pen today is
pours freely that
salt ooze--a bit
of ichor of your
cape which
spreads this
waking dawn
with words
I’d rather write
than lose.




The alchemical unio mentalis is the interpenetration of thought and image, of perceived world and imaginal world, a state of mind no longer concerned with distinctions between things and thought, appearance and reality, or between the spirit that develops the theory and the soul that builds fantasy.

We have colored this unio mentalis "blue," because the blue we have been encountering transfigures appearances into imaginal realities and imagines thought itself in a new way. Blue is preparatory to and incorporated in the white, indicating that the white becomes earth, that is, fixed and real, when the eye becomes blue, that is, able to see through thoughts as imaginative forms and images as the ground of reality.

-- James Hillman, "Blue"


BLUE HENGE

2005

Time and again I keep returning
to pass through you, my Cape,
each voyage a harrow of blue
awfulness, each mash of wind and
wave a saracen raised and set
like the plinth-works of Stonehenge,
your pass a dread cathedral in which
a wilder song is found or sounded
in a deeper throat. I do not know
why I cut these daily stones
from basalt old as God; nor can
I surmise what all these paper
plinths of blue together in their
circle choir or augur or harpuscape
from star or baleen spoor. Are
nipples drawn to lips or do they
ache my dream? Does your brute
socket fit my eye as the sea
it baleful moon, our tides a
mutual haul of lucent noons?
Perhaps. Surely I’m only next
to lose one face as he passed through,
that visage of all I know lost down
in a post-hole or shaft or well
that rings your dread zero,
the heart of all I’ll never know
and dread yet psalm and love.
In this I am son of a thousand
falling ships yet to sire their silt
harbors, my mouth all foam
in gale, each word a berg of sudden
ice I’ve yet to see which sink
me yet again not far from heaven’s
plash a half-mile further on.
For a season I’ve battened hatches
here -- a swooning fragrant month
inside the next summer’s womb,
where sweet and dire nereids
swim the amniotic brine inside
a sheelanagig I cannot see nor
truly brutally enough name. Her keep
this hour, Your Cape our Theme
in all its blue malt heave: Each
wave I hurl a wall, a plinth,
encircling an altar throne which
will not raise until I’ve faced
each pillar of salt with my old
and older names -- Chartres,
Stonehenge, Cape of cyclonic blue,
womb and round and center me
in that interred child’s skull
found split by some ghost axe.
My dragon thirst needs this cup
and I will pour the dregs of you
back down that viral throat.




It is the blue which deepens the idea of reflection beyond the single notion of mirroring, to the further notions of pondering, considering, meditating.

The colors which herald white are spoke of as Isis and the rainbow, as many flowers, and mainly as the brilliance of the peacock’s tail with its multiple eyes. According to Paracelsus, the colors result from dryness acting on moisture. Believe it or not, there is more color in the alchemical desert than in the flood, in less emotion than in more. Drying releases the soul from personal subjectivism, and as the moisture recedes that vivacity once possessed by feeling can now pass over into imagination. Blue is singularly important here because it is the color of the imagination tout court. I base this apodicticus not only on all we have been exploring: the blue mood which sponsors reverie, the blue sky which calls the mythic imagination to its farthest reaches, the blue of Mary who is the Western epitome of anima and her instigation of imaging making, the blue rose of romance, a pothos which pines for the impossible contra naturum (and pothos, the flower, was a blue larkspur or delphinium placed on graves) ...

-- James Hillman, “Blue”



BLUE LANTERN

2005

... all that you need to find poetry
is to look for it with a lantern.

-- Charles Wright, “The Secret of Poetry”

Here in the dead of night
I’m writing maps and copying
psalters, looking for old leys in
dark folds by which to
lamp my pen as I wind
my way into the heart of
that stillness. I’m like a
child playing hopscotch,
nine steps in nine steps out,
quarrying (here) the darkest
minerals I found down and in
the resounding cavern with
its canopy of cold, timeless drips.
It makes for long sentences,
sea-crossings and love-bowers,
each line pushing some limit
like stones falling all the way down
into the exclamation of silt
to disturb everything lost or
tossed there, a skull or
Prospero’s little black book
or an ancient sword my
Lady of Meres haunts
like a sheath. Even down
(here) the world above
has a say; some cankerous low in
Georgia or the Carolinas
keeps sucking huge draughts
of the Gulf of Mexico,
dropping hasty thick washes
of rain in its wake -- the
fifth day now of this crap .
Such storms make the
garden outside at this
black hour loll and snore
like a lover in those first months
of abandon when the sex drowns
everything else, shower upon
shower and the sun ever more pent
and stout and gilded from those
glidings, a brilliant horse galloping
in a sighing singing dark. Quench
me O Lord but never let the thirst
be expired -- that’s the sound of
first lovers, of the garden in June,
of this rapacious pen rising and
falling down the page when all
else drifts in a dark swoon.
Blue lantern, moon of my harrows,
shine just enough for me to see
when I’ve come to the last step
of the song (here) furthest
and down. Grant me blue lysis.
I pause for a moment (here)
to soak the full nougat
of the prima materia, this
blackest of hours; and then
turn back and round, jumping
from stone to stone
toward the last singing line,
door back to day paling far
under the east, this next poem
in hand still dripping with
the lucence of that now fading land.

Blue Fishes

Blue Moon,
You saw me standing alone,
Without a dream in my heart,
Without a love of my own.

Blue Moon,
You know just what I was there for,
You heard me saying a prayer for,
Someone I really could care for.

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will hold.
I heard somebody whisper please adore me
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold.

Blue Moon,
Now I'm no longer alone,
Without a dream in my heart,
Without a love of my own...

-- “Blue Moon”

***


Oh the wild lucency of an October full moon on a cloudless night! Coming down this morning at the usual darkest a.m. -- migrained clanging in my skull, my love abed upstairs so strung with worry, cat happily careening by my feet to wait, by my big white writing chair, for her morning treats -- the window in the hall was a blue magnitude, a heat, a phosphor, a sea-bright candescence: and looking out the night was dark and bright, like those rooms from my puberty lamped with blacklights that made teeth elven and nipples black: my Toyota Matrix in the driveway like a cresting or beached fish, its sliver blue paint morphing back into the silver blue waters covering all in a monochrome quintessence, blonde on blonde in the bed of eternal fire, same to same, blonde pubis mashed against blonde pubis, wet exhalations mutual: a union or communion or rapture of sames, complete even though the day half is banned from the ritual, barred from mystery.

***

Where there is no love, there is no art.

-- Paracelsus


The physician is the means by which nature is put to work. What the physician does is not his work. “The practice of this art lies in the heart; if your heart is false, the physician within you will be false.”

- Marie Louse von Franz, commenting on Jung’s paper “Paracelsus the Physician” in Carl Jung: His Myth in Our Time


DOLORIOUS BLOW

Oct. 15, 2005

It is when I tore Her veil
that I was wounded so,
lance in thigh, fang in heel,
Eden gained and lost:
With one thrust I
tossed Paradise to
bluer wave, finding thus
a ballsier rudder
astride that wild desire
which never heals nor dies.
A child no more and
greedy in my lust,
I tore the fruit from
every awful branch,
savoring that sweet
and terrible flesh
that broke upon my lips,
spilling a slicksweet
liquor I’d drink forever
if I could.
There I found and
foundered in vast blue
acreage, Pandora’s curves
hard-venomed with
Promethean fire,
a merry surge of
cleavages and clefts.
Delightful, yes, spiralling
fire, the exhalant Yes
a spume amid malt
endlessness: But beware
the darkness inside white fire!
Every other and nether
world was loosed from those
uplifted skirts as I plunged
my way on through, a welling
gout from Dis and Ys and
Dante’s pit howling in
in one upsurgent jeer.
Whether it rose from her
to me or flung from me in her,
I do not know. Perhaps that
darkness belongs to God,
a black throat salted in that
sea which knows every bedded
thrall the dream of sex conceives.
Oh the worlds
now covered by that
pour, aswoon and rapt,
tolling ghostly blickers
in the vespers of the night!
Ferrymen cross themselves
as they sail over my
black realm’s faery candles
and strange bells.
Now I am so pierced and
drained my realm is empty
as leather sack debauched
of vatic freight and left to
brown and wither on the shore.
And yet the bleeding does
not stop but empties me
still further each time
a man plunges down
the hellbent sluices of Amor.
Who will save me from this
dungeon where I’m chained
to carnal knowledge where
I’m petrifying into stone?
Upon the starry fundament
of my savage Grail that fate
is written, a codex for
all aging men with
drowning blue intents.
There comes inside
the narrative the one
who rides not waves
but fishes, his heart so pure
of God’s decrees as to
Eden every revel, proferring
bright and brighter
apples to the orb of
every one-eyed devil.
His quest relentlessly
pursues that shore where
I am found at last, his
journey not so much
toward beaches as from
each collapsing wave.
His visage is that
stubborn query which
sums the world almost
yet always fails, asking
every god to free me from
this longing chair I
too long ago enthroned,
loosening with each quest
the lock of fixed desires.
Our dance -- lost king,
washed son -- is both the
cause and effect of
all strange years
in which a wounding
is made whole by quests
to deep and darker
shores, away from
what is known, toward
saltier more savage
and untidy enquiries.
And we are
just the half of it, the
brighter upper surge of
that blue alchemy which
may one day delve in fire
and foam upon the final
fatal shore beyond departing
sighs. That day we’ll
all get on to her we loved
and lost and chapelled here,
queen mother wife and whore
of every well of white hot fires
we rappelled down in search of she
whom God in us desires.





Fascinating that the early fabulators of our literatures -- the writers of the romances and the Troubadours -- worked so creatively from old source material. They wrote new myths from old, vibrantly, deeply, wildly. It was a new experience, not retelling old myths but singing new ones from their bones; and that tradition they established was one of defiance against authority, reverence for the bliss, and a sort of serial chorus where one picked up where the last one left off and continued to create what we see as one vast myth.

Chretien de Troyes dies before his narrative is Perceval is finished; his story ends where he learns from an uncle -- now a hermit living in a trackless forest -- tells him the whole story of the wounding of the Fisher King and the consequent enchantment of his realm. Wolfram von Eschenbach then dreams the tale onward, with Perceval returning to the Grail Castle, asking the question, healing the king. He learns thus that the Fisher King is his grandfather (other versions have him as uncle), making him heir to the Grail. The tale is then picked up by others who focus on Galahad, the perfect knight, man where Perceval is forever boy, son of Lancelot and who would never fail in any quest. Galahad reaches the Grail Castle, achieves the Grail -- and disappears, going out in a blaze of glory.

Myths are genes of being, memes of conceiving, tales of parabolic vaults and falls, descents and returns: a vocabulary of mystery and wonder which still sings inside hammered prose and narrow poetics. They are instructive and fructive of this fray. Praise to every old song and singer, may they harrow my voice and amplify Your theme!

***


These selections are from Wolfram’s Parzival (transl. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage). By this time in the tale, Parzival has already blundered into the Grail Castle, is revealed the Hallows of the Grail (the broken sword, the silver platter, the bleeding lance and the Grail), but, heeding his mother’s admonition not to be so forward as to ask questions, remains silent, thus failing to heal the Fisher King of his wound. He wakes the next day and the castle has vanished. He returns to the court of Arthur where he is mocked by a crone for failing in his duty. He swears to not fail again and quests long in the world, meeting every challenge but not getting closer to the Grail Castle. A few bits of narrative and exposition, and then some insights from the Hermit he meets in the woods, who tells him more about the Fisher King and his wound.

***

The sword which Anfortas had given (Parzifal) snapped, as was prophesied, in the first encounter; but the spring which rises near Karnant, whose name is Lac, made it new and whole. That sword brought him many a triumph.

***

(Parzifal tells the Hermit) My chief need is for the Graal, after that, for my own wife -- no fairer creature ever drew suck from its mother’s breast. My heart yearns for them both.

***

(The Hermit tells Parzifal) The knights which defend the Graal are nourished by) a stone most precious: its name is lapsit exillis. By the power of that stone the phoenix, lighting upon it, is burnt to ashes; but the ashes then quicken it back to life. When with bright new wings, it springs from the pyre revived and beautified. There was never a man so ill, but on whatever day he beheld the stone, for the space of the whole week following he cannot die. Nor shall his colour fade. Be it maid or man, whoso beholds that stone shall keep the freshness of life’s prime. If one looked at that stone for two hundred year, but for the hair grown grey, no other sign of age would appear. Such power comes from the stone that flesh and bones are made young by it. It other name is the Graal.

***

They who took neither side, when Lucifer and the Trinity joined battle, those fair high angels were sent down to earth, to have charge of that stone. I know not if forgave them in the end or condemned them further.

***

(Of Anfortas -- the Fisher King -- the Hermit says) You and I, poor though I be, should never cease to pity from our hearts his sad affliction, which was the reward of pride. His youth and princely pride turned to his hurt, and to the world’s grief concerning him, because he set his desire on love unchartered. (italics mine)

“That way runs counter to the Graal’s decree. Under this, both knight and squire are pledged to resist all wantonness ...

“Amor was his battle cry! But that watchword does not go far to correct and humble.

“One day the king rode out alone (much did his people rue it), in quest of adventure, in the hope of love’s guerdon. Love’s desire pricked him to it. Then he was wounded by an envenomed spear, was thy sweet uncle, smitten in combat through the privy parts with hurt so sore that it has never healed ...”

(After every physic and folk-remedy has been attempted to heal the king) “Then we fell on our knees before the Graal. All at once we saw written thereon that a knight should come thither, from whose lips a question heard would end our trouble, but if anyone, child, maid, or man, warned him at all, his question would give no help, we should be in ill case as before, our hearts the sadder. The writing said: ‘Do you understand? Your warning may turn to hurt. If he does not question the first night here, the question will lose its power. But if in the right hour that word is spoken, he shall be king, and an end shall be made of your cumber by God’s high hand. Then Anfortas shall be healed, shall rule no longer.’”

***

“The king shall neither ride nor walk, nor stand nor lie. He leans, without sitting, as sore experience has taught him. When the moon change,s he suffers much. There is a lake called Brumbane: thither, when the wound grows noisome, they bear the king, that the sweet air may cleanse it. He calls that his fishing day, whence the tale grew that he was a fisherman! That name has clung to him, howbeit scarce likely it is that he, in his suffering state, can catch salmon or lamphreys or ply any sport at all, to cheer his sorrow.:

***

“He who has pledged himself to serve the Graal must forego love towards women. Only the King is allowed in single purity a wife by law; others are sent to rule over lordless lands.”


***

***

Segue here back to Campbell’s Creative Mythology, as he examines the figure of a fisherman who appears on an Orphic sacramental bowl of gold, dating to the third century AD -- stuff in the floorboards of the Christian tradition which gave birth to this demonic opposite, this wild individual howl:

“Orpheus the Fisherman is here shown with his fishing pole, the line wound around it, a mesh bag in his elevated hand, and a fish lying at his feet. One thinks of Christ’s words to his fishermen apostles, Peter, James, and John: “I shall make you fishers of men”; but also of the Fisher King of the legends of the Grail: and with this latter comes the idea that the central figure of the vessel, seated with a chalice in her hands, may be the prototype of the Grail Maiden in the castle to which the questing knight was directed by the Fisher King. A very early model of the mystic fisherman appears on Babylonian seals in a figure known as the “warden of the Fish”, while the most significant current reference is on the ring worn by the Pope, the “Fisherman’s Ring,” which is engraved with a representation of the miraculous draft of fishes that afforded the occasion of Christ’s words.

For the early fishing image was appropriate in a special way for the early Christian community, where in baptism the neophyte was drawn from the water like a fish. ... The Hindu legend of the birth of the great sage Vyasa from a fish-born virgin nicknamed Fishy Smell (whose proper name, however, was Truth) may recur to the mind at this point; and one thinks also of Jonah reborn from the whale -- of whom it is said in the MIdrash that in the belly of the fish he typifies the soul of man swallowed by Sheol. Christ himself is symbolized by a fish, and on Friday a fish meal is consumed.

Evidently we have here broken into a context of considerable antiquity, referring to a plunge into abyssal waters, to emerge as though reborn; of which spiritual experience perhaps the best-known ancient legend is of the plunge of the Babylonian King Gilgamensh to pluck the plant of immortality from the cosmic ocean. ... An Assyrian cylinder seal of c. 700 B.C. (the period to which the prophet Jonah is commonly assigned), shows a worshipper with outstretched arms arriving at this immortal plant on the floor of the abyss, where it is found guarded by two fish-men. (12-13)

***

Let us also remember that Melville sources whaling in this deepest ancestor:

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?”

(“The Honor and Glory of Whaling” chapter of Moby Dick)

***

Thus our Fisher King composes a modern dream of an old myth; and he, too, rides naked on the back of a fish atop my family crest; he is lord of this next beach, this subsequent song, this wilder room of the dream.






FISH TALE

Feb. 2005

I have made of that old
adventure wooing
you a fish-tale,
the bedded bliss
become an isle that
walked or swam but
most certainly got
full away. The story has
grown fins then flukes
in its retellings,
found a wavelike
slap-and-sloshing resonance,
the sound of crashing
shores I only dreamed
back then, tidally
awakened in your arms
at last. All that remains
is that sound -- a semblance
of wild love which is both
spring river and trembling
bridge, both love and
lover pouring forth in
one gout of song the
three hearts which no
actual kiss may staunch,
much less damn, the
way sea-walls may jetty
sand chapels for a time
but the sea swells
tide the ends of every
ocean to full blue.
Of that short time
that broke all my clocks
I now endlessly return,
and walk, like a shore,
up and down its ghostly
reaches, performing
stations of devotion
on the way. Here fresh
on the beach I drove
off into the night
an emptied, riven man --
Here by this stump of
broken mast I stood
at the bar, pounding
down three shots of
blue lactissima -- Here
by the moonlit mash
of waves I met you,
your face averted to
the band, your breasts
rising from a lacy blouse
to imprison me between
the ocean and its heavings,
the high heart’s saltiest
retrievings. And here
on a stretch of
shattered whelks and
scattered, sprawled weeds
is where we thrashed
together in one wilding
spume, a shout which
rang the bells of heaven
and returned, forever
seared and scarred by
your lips, or mine, or
some wakened pair,
delivered by the sea
and ghosting every each
and croon inside every
tidal day long since.
My fish-tale has made of
me the tunny, elusive
and sea-wise, the slipperiest
half of soul no man
may mount and vaunt,
the prize more priceless
every time I reel the
telling out. The one
that got away became
the tail in every wave,
a sea-wife who sings
below, our children in
these darkling verses,
swans of riven undertow,
a dark gleam of moonlight
on massed waters, the
brilliant folded crash
we found and woke together
that one night, now
every night to wash
the shores I dream.
My myth grows deeper
every time I sing
that mythic night,
like the ocean filling
everything the moon
left in its wake.
Have I told you about
that night when
from the deepest sea
a woman roused
the depths of me?



THE SOUL FISH

May 2005

... The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.
-- Jack Gilbert, “A Walk Blossoming”

Wisdom consists in keeping the soul
liquid. There must be the Abyss, Nyx,
and Chaos, out of which all things come,
and they must never be far off. Cut off
the connection between any of your works
and this dread origin, and the work is shallow
and unsatisfying.
— Emerson, Journal (1842)

In rural Ireland -- where the men who
remain often fail to marry and then
go mad -- there is a stubborn folk belief
that the soul is a fish located under
the arm. It’s a slippery, untrustworthy
presence, this scaly soul, prone to
errant nonsense, whispering all night
from those men’s ancient pillows
to sell the farm and seeking love
across the banished oceans
of the earth. Pure foolishness, that
a fish would swim that far, just to
expire between some cuspate thighs,
when pints and pipesmoke are
almost enough tamp the grieving down.
Still, there’s something noble to
them about that fish’s travail, so bold
and burning that it knocks down every
church in the parish, leaving turds
in the chalice. Soul begone! is the
prayer for too-clenched teeth -- not the
soul we pray Michael row to heaven
but its fraught freezing sea, all waves and
salt liquor and fluked beasts who
loll and haul the tide like the
fifty cows of Tethys. It is the lurching
part of every desire that must betray
the long-denied bed. No wonder
schizophrenia runs rife in the poor
counties of western Ireland,
too close perhaps to those tall cliffs
of Moher where the distance to the
doomed sea is measured the ache luring
and leaping in the chest, somewhere
beneath the arm that pushes back
with a man’s failing strength. Their
churches too long ago banned that
fish from the liturgy, and now those
churches fade to ruin, ossuaries of
Latin embalmed in a hoarse brogue.
The crash of North Sea surf against
those cliffs will eat the heart of God
away and all the fish will tumble
down at last into the reign of foam
and fire. And then the good aged
crofters of Clare and Kerry will
quit their bruited turf and join
hands out there to dance and
then fan out to fey the bed
of every maid matron and crone,
a school of salmon leaping
from the lakes to barge their
way on home. And all the
gals will sing Amen my man.


FISHY COMMUTE

April 2005

According to Glaber, Brendan
is taken to an island paradise
by the whale, while the Vita St.
Davidis states that the saint was
“leading a wondrous life on the
back of a sea-monster” and
was heading for Wales.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

I’ve grown so used to days and
nights aboard a fish that his
commutes are a suburb I’ve lived
in for years, at home on waters
he whorls deep while
I work in the garden in
the paper-whirl of butterflies.
Last night driving home
from the poetry event,
fine language sounding in
my ear without translation,
I drove roads I rarely
see so late -- I-4, Maitland
Boulevard, long lonely
SR-441. Night scenes
of broadened emptiness
and tired urgency ghosted
up from under and without,
flukes of the same whale
though darker. Billy Stayhorn
ballads on the jazz station,
the pianist stepping delicately
down his vertebrae as
I drive home to my
beloved wife and You,
my shrieking blue Cape
of verse matins miles
away from first light. Such
gentility I found on the
back of ancient night, sweet
tidals bearing a wreckage
within sight of the next shore.

Redoundin'

Sunday

Balm at last in last night’s break in the weather, a front blowing out the humid wretchedworks, cooling things down into the 60s last night. A wan Saturday followed, the light burnished, halcyon, still, causing everyone to open their windows and breathe deep, and sing together in one loud chorale, (maestro,)


TO AUTUMN

John Keats

I.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

II.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too --
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from the hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

***

I spent another Saturday afternoon watching football games and reading deep, strange pairing, like Vienna sausages delved on devilish toothpicks draughted down with the coldest Reisling, distilled from that harvest moon having swollen past full under the black Atlantic & now blasting overhead.

Thus it was Old Miss in a tight one against Alabama (losing by a field goal in the last seconds), Boston College beating Wake Forest in backforthbackforthback roll beneath an unforgiveably rainy Northeast sky, Florida losing to LSU, and USC getting stiff competition from Notre Dame down to the final whistle and FSU losing, dammit, to Virginia. Another Saturday in the unfolding season where the knights have at it with red joy, hurling their lances with every cusp of testosterone and cheerleeder splits and Gatorade.

And thus I first read a bit of Goethe’s Faust where an invoked spirit claims the audacity of life itself, the hard bronze balls of those gridiron warriors flashing onscreen (hiding the real war overseas),

In the tides of life, in action’s storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at time’s humming loom it’s my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

-- I.500-509, transl. George Madison Priest

Spirit of life itself, indeed -- Demonic? Or at least its deepest ministrations? Is life itself an affront to God? Do we err by taking breath?

A divine darkness, perhaps. So Goethe wrote in Dichtung und Wahreit, Part 4, Book 20:

He believed he had discovered in Nature, something which manifested itself only in contradictions ... It contracted time and expanded space. It seemed to be at home in the impossible and to reject, with scorn, the possible. This mode of being I called the Demonic ... It appears in its most terrifying form when manifest in a single human being ... They are not always the most excellent people ... but a terrible force comes out of them. From such considerations arise that strange and striking proverb: Deno contra deum nisis deus ipse. (“No one can rival God except God himself.”)

That passage was cited in Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. He’s delving here into a defiant anti-hero which has tripartite faces in Goethe’s Faust, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the figure of Don Juan -- “the doctor who deludes himself that he wants a life of action ... the nutty knight who truly loves and lives by his books of chivalry ... the irritable self-defeating Spanish womanizer.” All step off their pages into a life of action, a thought become a deed.

Each also embodies a tuff conundrum when it comes to knowledge. Goethe put it this way: “He who acts is always without scruples; only he who contemplates has a conscience.” Shattuck: “One could restate this moral paradox: Experience is the only route to human knowledge; yet any experience, when reflected upon, incurs guilt. In Paradise Lost, Milton has both Adam and Eve find the word experience to justify their errant actions. Seen in this light, Faust reenacts the Fall and attains knowledge (Wissen) through action, however interrupted and aborted the action may be.”

This seems a legacy from the Titans, those brute shoulders of savage difference, the indignant rage of pain vaulted at the skies from the inchoate volcano. Ahab conceives of this man -- surely in the image of himself -- as the ship’s carpenter whittles him a new leg from the jawbone of a Sperm whale:

“I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire, for what’s made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell’s probable.”

He pauses, considers, and speaks again:

“... Hold, while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modeled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ‘em , to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; let me see -- shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a skylight on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.”

***

This indeed is the shape and girth of a man whose “right worship is defiance”! Yet these titans or demons of rebellious desire, are they not all written demiurges, the product of a creative imagination which thieves the world’s fire to harrow a burning book? Our literature produces these Gospels, books after book of conceivings, narrative exploits of our every assault and doom.

Indeed, can it occur anywhere but on the page which we leap from? Sez Faust:

Parchment! Is that the sacred fountain whence a love
There springs a draught that thirst forever quells?
Refreshment? It you never will have won
If from that soul of yours in never wells. (I.566-9)

Faust is Goethe’s literary exception, the one who leaps from the page into the dewy folds of the Realm of the Mothers. The satanic text is the fantasy which rises from the pure white page.



A page from St. Columba's Cathach, the psalter he copied in secret and then went to war over in defiance of the king, who demanded he give the psalter to the owner of the original text.



Monday

Faust is also a wonderful and storied embodiment of the Backward Glance, he who from one conscious extreme decides to ride the way back, astride the back of a learned lust, if there can be such a thing.

It is a lonely and trackless path, prone to the worst excesses and abysms of error, A holy one, too, if infernally so, defiant of all prior authority. And its the only way we can go now, our superegos, like iron cathedrals, having damned and dammed every impulse which sets us free. Joseph Campbell called this process Creative Mythology, the individual’s backward glance to sources, out beyond the marge of the safe and known:

“In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling “creative” mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own -- of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration -- which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import; his communication will have the value and force of living myth ...” (Creative Mythology, 4)

Campbell’s central applications of this theory of the literary myth come in his discussion of two literary works from the late Middle Ages -- Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s . Their strivings were foundational and are educational for our own:

“It is amazing, really, to think that in our present world with all its sciences and machines, megalopolitan populations, penetrations of space and time, night life and revolutions, so different (it would seem) from the God-filled world of the Middle Ages, young people should still exist among us who are facing in their minds, seriously, the same adventure as thirteenth-century Gottfried: challenging hell. If one could think of the Western World for a moment in terms not of time but of space; not as changing in time, but as remaining in space, with the men of its various eras, each in his own environment, still there as contemporaries discoursing, one could perhaps pass from one to another in a trackless magical forest, or as in a garden of winding ways and little bridges. The utilization of Wagner of both the Tristan of Gottfried and the majestic Parzival of Gottfried’s leading contemporary, Wolfram von Eschenbach, would suggest perhaps a trail; so also the line, very strong indeed, from Gottfied to James Joyce.” (38)

So the creative, individual effort has become a tradition of sorts in this culture, an anti-authorian, bliss-centered, fecund garden of song and story. Those makings are canonic in every way the Church and the prior Mysteries were canonical, something to be studied and practiced: Yet they are also anti-canonical in the Oranic sense, for instead of mouthing a liturgy which that tradition provides, the creative mythologist rides the canon, he or she devours it, fucks it, flings it wide: It provides the pep and the blade but the artist is the one who discovers the arc and target, slashing off the balls of the father and heaving it to an unknown unnamable sea where the divinely nippled paramour rises in fire and foam.

Campbell again:

“In Hero with a Thousand Faces I have shown that myths and wonder tales of this kind [the Grail cycle] belong to a general type, which I have called ‘The Adventure of the Hero,’ that has not changed in essential form throughout the documented history of mankind: 1. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (in the previous instances, regions under enchantment); 2. fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (the enchantments are dispelled); 3. the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

“In Wolfram’s Parzival the boon is to be the inauguration of a new age of the human spirit: of secular spirituality, sustained by self-responsible individuals acting not in terms of general laws supposed to represent the will or way of some personal god or impersonal eternity, but each in terms of his own developing realization of worth.

“Such an idea is distinctly -- and uniquely -- European. It is the idea represented in Schopenhauer’s ‘intelligible’ character; the old Germanic wyrd, a life responsible to itself, to its own supreme experiences and expectations of value, realized through trials in truth, loyalty, and love, and by example redounding, then, to the inspiration of others to like achievement.” (ibid. 480)


***

Redounding, what an excellent choice of word to name this fertile transmission of living myth from one heart to another! cf Middle English redounden to overflow, to be in excess; to become swollen: surge up: billow; to be excessive in quantity; to have an effect for good or ill: conduce: to be a contributing facto to repute; to become transferred or added [as in troping, I may add]; to accrue; to issue forth; to become deflected backward; to rebound, reflect. (These from Websters Third International Dictionary).

What is this Wick-lit-in’ but spilling up and over the deep sources I’ve found, and to sing that fullness back with every verbal iota I can pan from the cold mineral waters that wash from ear to ear, nose to toes, through heart and belly and balls, shouting from cocktip and mouth the wildest names of God in the world ...

Ah, let the infernal crew sing, wyrd and redoundin’, slathered in the cool sea of a full October moon roaring over this hour of 5:25 a.m....as I leave this page to begin the ding dong working day ...




GOING WRONG

Jack Gilbert

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence.” The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
“No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn.” Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

TUTORIAL

Ted Hughes
from Recklings, 1966

Like a propped skull,
his humor is medieval.

What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards
Pressing the drying remains of men.
He brings some out, we stew them up to a
dark amber and start sipping.

He is fat, this burst bearskin, but his
mind is an electric mantis
Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.
I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk,
I go round and round numbly under the ice
of the North Pole.

This scholar dribbling tea
Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle
Through the wharf-weed that ennobles

The mask of enquiry, advancing into the
depths like a harbor,
Like a sphinx cliff,
Like the papery skull of a fish

Lodged in a sand dune, with a few straws,
Rifled by dry cold.
His words

Twitch and rustle, twitch
And rustle.
The scarred world looks through their gaps.

I listen
with bleak eyeholes.



UPRISING

Stephen Dobyns


Straightjacket, straightjacket, straightjacket:
we are tired of this quiet life, tired of climbing
this mountain of pleases and thank yous.
It’s time to kick a nun in the butt,
time to buy our prick a goddamned big car
and let the wind frazzle our ears.
It’s time to stop this tiptoeing around,
to stop being the property of our property.
Who lives in this holy temple anyhow?
Let’s get the formaldehyde out of our veins.
Let’s strip this lampshade off of our head.
It’s time to stand at the door, shouting, Come back!
It’s time to welcome each of our badnesses home.
And here comes Envy sliding along on greased feet,
and gray-suited Lechery with his little cane,
and twin-headed Vanity winking into his own eyes,
and Anger going Grum, Grum on his little red scooter,
and chubby Appetite panting along behind the rest.
The beer’s cold, the insults are hot. We’ll dance
all night to the complaints of our neighbors.
We’ve got to get moving! Somewhere that shovel
stands propped against a wall, the patch of grass
is freshly cut where the final hole will be dug.
Let’s march toward our grave scratching and farting,
our own raucous music of shouted good-byes.
Let’s make sure they bury us standing up.



TO EARTHWARD

Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed to much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of--was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.


THE SOURCE

Sharon Olds

It became the deep spring of my life,
I didn’t know if it was a sickness or a gift.
To reach around both sides of a man,
one palm to one buttock,
the other palm to the other, the way we are split,
to grasp that band of muscle on the male
haunch and help guide the massed
heavy nerve down my throat until it
stoppers the hole behind the breastbone that is always hungry,
then I feel complete. To be lifted
onto a man—the male breast
so hard, there seem no chambers in it, it is
lifting-muscle—and set tight as a lock-slot down
onto a bolt, we are looking into
each other’s eyes as if the matter of the iris were
a membrane deep in the body dissolving now,
it is what I had dreamed, to meet men
fully, as a woman twin, unborn,
haif-gelled, clasped, nothing between us
but our bodies, naked, and when those dissolve,
nothing between us—or perhaps I vanish
and the man is still there, as if I have been trying
to disappear, into them,
to be myself the glass of sourmash
my father lifted to his mouth. Ah, I am in him,
I slide all the way down to the beginning, the
curved chamber of the balls. My brothers
and sisters are there, swimming by the cinerous
millions, I say to them, Stay here—
for the children of this father it may be the better life;
but they cannot hear. Blind, deaf,
armless, brainless, they plunge forward,
driven, desperate to enter the other, to
die in her, and wake. For a moment,
after we wake, we are without desire—
five, ten, twenty seconds of
pure calm, as if each one of us is whole.



EASTERN AUBADE

Ranier Maria Rilke

From New Poems
transl. Edward Snow


Is this bed not like some coast,
just a strip of coast on which we lie?
Nothing is certain except your high breasts,
which mounted dizzily beyond my feeling.

For this night, in which so many things screamed,
in which beasts call and tear each other,
does its strangeness not appall us? And yet:
what outside slowly dawns, called day,
do we find it any more familiar?

One would have to lie as tightly intertwined
as flower petals around the stamen:
for the unrestrained stands everywhere
and masses and plunges toward us.

Yet while we press against each other,
in order not to see it closing in,
can it draw itself from you, from me:
for our souls live on treason.


”MY PERIOD HAD COME FOR PRAYER”

Emily Dickinson
(Later Poems XLI)


My period had come for prayer,
No other art would do,
My tactics missed a rudiment;
Creator, was it you?

Gods grow above, so those who pray
Horizons must ascend,
And so I stood upon the North
To reach this curious Friend.

His house was not; no sign had He
By chimney nor by door,--
Could I infer his residence?
Wide prairies of the air

Unbroken by a settler
Were all that I could see;
Infinitude, hast thou no face
That I might look on Thee?

The silence condescended,
The Heavens paused for me,
But awed by my errand,
I worshipped--did not pray!

NIGHT

Robinson Jeffers

The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken
Tide-rocks lift streaming shoulders
Out of the slack, the slow west
Sombering its torch; a ship's light
Shows faintly, far out,
Over the weight of the prone ocean
On the low cloud.

Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood,
Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river,
Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow,
Peace-bringer, the matrix 0f all shining and quieter of shining.
Where the shore widens on the bay she opens dark wings
And the ocean accepts her glory. 0 soul worshipful of her
You like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always,
And the film of waves above that takes she sun takes also
Her, with more love. The sun-lovers have a blond favorite,
A father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laughter,
Hot labor, lust and delight and the other blemishes. Quietness
Flows from her deeper fountain; and he will die; and she is imnmortal.

Far off from here the slender
Flocks of the mountain forest
Move among stems like towers
Of the old redwoods to the stream,
No twig crackling; dip shy
Wild muzzles into the mountain water
Among the dark ferns.
O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon
The blasphemies 0f glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the fretfulness
0f cities, the cressess of the planets, the pride of the stars.
This August night in a rift of cloud Antares reddens,
The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children,
The earth's orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire

Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you O Night
What? Not a spark? What flicker 0f a spark in the faint far glimmer
0f a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sand-pit the Bedouins
Wandered from at dawn . . . Ah singing prayer to what gulfs tempted
Suddenly are you more lost? To us the near-hand mountain
Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a measure of continuance.

The tide, moving the night's
Vastness with lonely voices,
Turns, the deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength
To the Outmost margins: you Night will resume
The stars in your time.

O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward?
Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,
Tire of their flow, they sing one song hut they think silence.
The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness.
And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately
Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward
The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,
The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory
Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.
And I and my people, we are willing to love she four-score years
Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor.

Have men's minds changed,
Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul
Broken the surface? A few centuries
Gone by, was none dared not to people
The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier,
And death is no evil.



LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT

David St. John

Tired of his dark dominion . . .
--George Meredith

It was something I’d overheard
One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously
Saying to a mutual friend, a woman
Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips
That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always
Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country
Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me
As being a city of the night . . . “
Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant
Not simply because I love
Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening
As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky,
The whole mind of night that I know so well
Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite,
Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome
Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen
To live when I grew tired of,my ancient life
As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness
Was of the kind that consoles so many
Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history
Of falls . . . No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark
Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur
Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of
The She-Wolf all the sequins above in sequence,
The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians
A dark like the polished back of a mirror,
The pool of the night scalloped and hanging
Above me, the inverted reflection of a last,
Odd Narcissus . . .

One night my friend Nico came by
Close to three A.M. - As we drank a little wine, I could see
The black of her pupils blown wide,
The spread ripples of the opiate night . . . And Nico
Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost
Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look . . . ,”
And deep within the pupil of her left eye,
Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging
Lantern rocking with the waves,
I could see, at the most remote end of the receding,
Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway,
At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil,
A tiny, dangling crucifix
Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting
In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain . . .
Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing
Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid
Kaleidoscope washing over her the way any naked,
Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip
Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly
Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly
Love of sexual sincerity . . .
I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember
The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let
Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather
Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind
Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents,
Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves;
The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling . . .
Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere,
Then forever . . .

Into the mind of the Roman night.