Nekyia With A Porpoise

The shaman begins his new, his true life by a “separation” -- that is ... by a spiritual crisis that is not lacking in tragic greatness and beauty.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 12

***

This post is a bit about dark harrows, the danger of going there, the madness down under, what one learns there in the dissembling cauldron of acid nights, what returns ...

***

Yes to wild dark; yes to the booming antiphons of great, massy, finned, crest-and-smash-and-spume Lir; yes to the theurigic magic of divine lucence, to all that shines in darkness; yes to Ahab’s “the right worship is defiance”; Yes to “a bold and nervous lofty language” (Melville) which transports the shaman-poet to the depths of the world-in-word, to the realm of brute ancient vital totems, the cathedral at the bottom of the heart: Yes, hosannah and amen to all that:

And yet ...

Do not confuse or terrorize the life with it ... never think you can fall that way in life again ...

It is meet to temper the exhilaration of wild black broodings by recalling its stain of my own biography. Tuesday night driving home in heavy rain, dark now at 6 p.m. in the heavy arrears of the year, traffic on 441 slogging through downtown Apopka bleary and wet, fractured light through my car windows mi xing with the sounds of Lyle Mays’ Solo on the CD player, a perfect ache of the ivories resounding in black-ebony plush, tearing some old wound and flooding me bloodlike with memories of old sodden days, of my long futile ache in boozy wallows:

And so I recalled that mind which is still mine which then sensed all these deeper divinities yet was melancholy, so blue, sometimes suicidally so, as if to live another day was to be forced to climb back on the cross and bleed the world away anew and then crabble to the bar to drink the world to dregs ... The freight of that ache when it seeks mortal beds for it, all too impossibly far away ...

I think of Melville the drunk who died falling down the stairs, all his work come to absolute naught, Moby Dick his gnostic gospel wholly reviled by critics and then forgotten like a book tossed down the Pequod’s wake: ah such clarity and wildness of soul produced that wonderful book, but the heart which devled those words proved too dark for its creator ...

In Chapter 112 of Moby Dick we are told the story of the Blacksmith Perth, a bent, old, horribly beaten man whose charred past still smouldered in his eyes; on land he had once been a good family man, but misfortune and “the Bottle Conjuror” had sucked away his goodly godly humour, leaving the rock-bottom man for whom whaling is most suited; he is Ahab’s shoreside familiar, Melville’s fallen Christian soul perhaps, the wrack of insufficient lucence, how booze will get ya if yer God isn’t big enough ...



Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all- receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them - Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling. (Chapter 112)

***

In lieu of Lir there’s Launcelot, the Man of Action, for whom reflection serves no quest; there is no hesitation for this man between scabbard and flashed sword, or zipper and rude pecker; Action is the eternal antidote to Thought, the literal enactment which dispenses with literary treatments. Sorry Charlie, we don’t want tuna with good taste, we want tuna that stains our chops with sweet meat. Of course the wild dark is thronged with banshees and savages, wild-eyed revenants with filed teeth: Of course their purposes are bloody: Every night it ends with them tearing at some prey in the saddest place in the world, heads out of view in entrails whilst the victim’s faded eyes stare off. The bloodlust is horrible and washes deeply through the heart; sometimes I wonder if the ache for perfect communion is just a psychic sweetener which justifies the baser hunt; if every act of tenderness does not bare canines somehow -- terrible and mad to think that way, but that’s what froths in the mix when I flash a light down here ...



The gods fare better with this shit than we do ... We must wear suits of armor, heading down so deep ... In Goethe’s Faust I, when Faust cries aloud to Mephistopheles his grief and rage over the predicament he has gotten Gretchen into with his desire (he kills her brother and she is imprisoned, sorrowing, in her room), he is oh so sorry for have wished to ride upon the back of so great a dragon: Mephistopheles scowls,

Now we are again at our wits’ end where the
reason of you mortals snaps from overstretching.
Why do you enter into fellowship with us, if you
cannot carry it through? Will you fly and are
not save from dizziness? Did we force
ourselves on you, or you on us?
(“A Dismal Day,” 23-8, transl. George Madison Priest)

Faust thought the great powers were as bright as his studies, and is revolted to see how destructive they are:

Great, glorious Spirit, Thou who didst deign to
appear to me, Thou who knowest my heart and
my soul, why fetter me to the infamous comrade
who feeds on mischief and slakes his thirst in destruction?
(ibid 27-30)

A quandry of eros and thanatos, perhaps. Can there be theurgy with love, Ahab blessing the white whale, loving its nature? Or does that humanize the limbic veld too much, replacing mythology with biography? No: Eros was there at the beginning: It is he who drives this pen towards the vastiest deep, longing for reunion and commingling of the vital fluids: Between Lir and me is a heart, though filled with angels and devils: Between this work and my life is my heart, where I soon will shut off the computer, clean up, and go lay in bed next to my wife, in love with the absolute ordinaries of day, its little rituals, its human furnishings, its literal comforts.

Dragons just beyond the margins of this copy, brutal, incessant, infernal, sexual, wild: I dare not go to deeply there, and yet I must: My feet walk on fishes, “hovering up, hovering down, bending low, bending down” (Faust describing the witches who “weave” “round the Ravenstone”, 4001): Then stepping off to shore where my Beloved groans, yawns, scratches, wakes, offering her feet to me to stroke, slowly, lightly, gently, eternally.



WELCOME TO THE ABYSS

2001

Since no animal can make its own food,
the creatures of the deeper waters live
a strange, almost parasitic existence
of utter dependence on the upper layers.
These hungry creatures prey fiercely and
relentlessly upon each other, yet the whole
community is ultimately dependent upon the
slow rain of descending food from above ...
— Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Whom filth plenished,
dearth devoured.
— Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Here in the abyssal
developments
the roads are paved
by an incessant rain:
berserkers in
their broken
boats, pirates whose last
word was “whoops,”
victims of exploding
airlines descending
smaller to us from
much higher up.
We eat what we can.
The road through
our small world
is pure defecation and
inedible, indelible bone.

In our neighborhood
it’s too dark to know
a face, but if you could
you’d be sorry.
We all have eyes
like extra-large
pie-plates and
huge jaws for catching
what we can.

Our diet’s
rounded with the
leavings of the leavings
of the leavings, and
less, a bite of
tiger shark, finger
of a gunman.
Oh how we dine
on all perdition.

Not much to see
round here but
the music never stops:
weird moans, trills,
clicks, and clatters
fill our nocturnal air,
a radar for appetite
and procreation.

We breathe the
inkiest of drink,
so dark and cold
and dense to be
the very heart
of the nihilist.
An edible grave.

We descended
seeking a little
elbow room in
a food chain too
tightly knit: grew
strong in our
abysms. We’ll live
forever since
everything you say
eventually falls
our way.

Welcome to the
Final Receipt, resting
place of all, Turd ‘Burb,
last house on the block
where we seize with
hungry jaws the
bitterest of God’s laws.






THE WORDS WHICH GOT ME HERE

from A Breviary of Guitars,, 1999


1.

July 1999

At my sister’s
last night for
to celebrate
my mother’s
and my birthday:
Her kids
all earnest
love and purpose,
breathlessly
offering hugs
and wedging
onto my lap
as I tried
to talk with
my mother.
Kathy weaving
through the
mayhem with
her camera
taking pictures
(at 10, she’s
gotten pretty good)
and Nicholas
in his room,
the eternally
embarrassed
teenager. Then
at the table
with my sister
& her husband Jim,
my mother, her sister
Flossie and
Uncle Frank,
cousin Carol, my
wife just in from work:
All of us making
short work of
roast turkey,
carrot casserole, my
mega salad
(green beans,
roast potatoes, grape
tomatoes, spring greens
and Dijon-
garlic-balsamic
vinegar vinaigrette),
finishing off with
Uncle Franks homemade
lemon icecream:
The kids at the
other table
nibbling and giggling,
trying to be quiet:
while us adults
tried to update
the past 6 month’s
swing of life:
Frank and Flossie’s
trip to Guatamala
making efficient stoves
for Mayan Indians
(saving rainforest);
Carol’s cats
(including a
sad tale of Lucky
who died at
just 8 months);
mys sister & her
family’s trip
to a cabin
in Georgia: my
wife’s labors
in her booth;
my mother’s
hard days tending
a mean old blind
woman; my own
creative digs
of design for auditors,
writing reviews,
versifying so
excessively here:
We move on to
absent siblings’
lives, houses
and illness and
career changes,
funny anecdotes
about grandchildren:
As usual the
subjects hold for
a sentence or two
before the next one
passes round the
table like a plate
of second helpings:
We’ve done this for
so many years
now, in marriage and
divorce, kids
sprouting out of
diapers clutching
dolls in and
then huddling
behind doors with
the music pounding
away: Each gathering
now is a harvest
of more growing up
and us always
somehow older,
quieter, treasuring
what we always
find here together
(we swear upon
departure that we
just have to do
this more often):
A way to age,
perhaps, which looks
at all the
impatient striving
we do on our own
(Frank with his
new knees at the
gym, Carol
managing schizophrenia,
my wife so
battered by
her nephew’s death)
—and smiles.


2.

Spring 1978

Back in late
Winter ‘77-78
I knew none
of this. I woke
mornings watching
my breath frost
up into the gloom
of dawn as the
first glints of waking
pierced a fog
of dope and beer and
days lost to figurative
descents. Cheap instant
coffee and a cigarette,
a journal opened
blankly waiting for
what little I could
summon up to say.
That was what
wintering was
like before I learned
about wintering
without a woman:
Before I left
my metaphoric home:
My winters then
where when my
parents battered me
with their
love and icy ills.
I mean from the
barrows a parent
digs blindly
in their child &
which the child
spends the rest
of his life
digging out from:
Some never emerge
and the rest of us
maybe halfway:
My mother
was in Florida
in a world of hurt
and my father
back East too
creating New
Age symphonies,
yet my remove
in far Spokane
seemed hardly far
enough: my own
sense of self
like a fragile tangle
of weeds tumbling
between those inner
ranges called Mother
and Father: My
mother’s love
blocked by a fury
with my father
turned voraciously
inward into a
moody dark deep
& soured by
a fundamentalist
cant I had
fallen deeply
away from: My father
a looming self &
utterly possessed
with mission and making,
his Presbyterian
beliefs composting
in a gay New Age
garden: These were
not your parents?
It doesn’t matter:
Names yours
and you’ll have
one part of
your story:

3.

I’ve always been
one of little faith,
and winter hard
outside the breasty
embraces of the sun:
Back in Spokane
I have no
life to return
to, none that feels
in any way
comparable to
the magic wealth
of my father’s
house, imagination,
and making: Instead
I have cold
cold dingy rooms
of a rented house
just off campus,
littered with
the detritus
of party boys.
A few books,
a journal, a pen,
studies that spring
in writing poetry
and modern
music, that
white Strat
leaning against
my amp. It all
feels like nothing,
of so little
consequence
or importance that
I spiral into
that vacuum
I had formed in
giving up so much
ground to my father.
Playing that white Strat
at night with frost on
the window and the music
and icy sort of jazz,
inarticulate ditties
of loss and despair.
The IsoSoul,
I called him,
a man trapped inside
a boy, a mask of
torpor unable to
reveal myself
to the world.
Being bereft
of Becoming
means impotence
and self-rage.
I sat in classes
looking up from
that dank well,
invisible, seething.
Dope stems
and empty beer cans
and the world
just going on
in the bleak
half-light
of a life half-lived.
Cheap instant
coffee and a
cigarette, Fripp
& Eno’s Evening
Star: a cheap
blue journal
in which I
scrawled my
lines of poetry:

My mother has her secret looks,
and my father, his secret-books.
I could have put my side to sleep,
pulled back the velvet curtains
of the deep, in short, closed the show;
But snow is melting from my eyes,
and pine trees rise triumphant to the sun.
The time of knowing’s past.
It’s a season for the feet.

Pure Roethke, I know:
I was infected
with his song,
that way he turned
a line into pure
music: Ted
my idol, the
singing bear:
--oafish and
achingly clear
about beautiful
sonorous things.
Mad too: But
that was a damned
sight better than
Sylvia Plath, my
darker muse
those days,
whose “Moon
and The Yew Tree”
scared me for
being so close.
O sweet allure
of “blackness and
silence.” Aged
19 and alone,
post-Christian,
back again
in college but feeling
so profound a
need to write
of off-campus,
living things
I knew so little of --
and isolate,
unable to speak
around others,
alone much of
the day and night
and next day
and night: Finding
words in
ways that
were finally
boats for
crossing great
waters--saying
things at least
on paper well
enough to
suggest an
encounter with
the world
that sufficed:
Still awkward
and inept
everywhere else
—love’s oaf:
A boyman who
had to live
those days
before he could
later sit at the
table surrounded
by so much
joyous family:
That boy who
chased and lost
a music into
this great
sea of words
in getting from
there to here:




DEEP SONG

2002

Deep in the body’s hollows
between bone transept
and gut nave, chilled in
the stone marrow of our lives,
there breathes a ghostlike,
garbled presence, half fish,
half horse, a hoarder of
old treasure in the
soul’s aphotic keep.

Here is the ur-father,
demi-dad, a galloper
on crest and surge,
a man’s man with
boulders for boots
and a cudgel for a cock.
Prime and primeval,
he’s balled down
there in the world’s vesicle,
his white magna
balled in every vowel.

When my words
revise to this line
they sink down to him
like skipped stones
at throw’s end
to irritate the shit
outta him (and you
don’t want to
piss off god whose
horse shits Texans).

His art is rimmed
with basalt keels,
the deep end of all ceasing:
to me this cry,
this ravening song
eared from stars
and poured deep.
For me the spear plunge;
for him, the feasting.


L’AMOUR BLEU

from A Breviary of Guitars, 1999-2000

Winter 1984:

“Sadness is not
the whole of it,”

Hillman again
in “Blue:”

“A turbulent
dissolution
of the nigredo
can also show as
blue movies,
blue language,
l’amour bleu,
bluebeard, blue
murder, and
cyonotic body:
When these sorts
of pornographic,
perverse, ghastly,
or vicious
animus/anima
fantasies start
up, we can place
them within the
blue transition
toward the albedo:
Then we can
look for bits
of silver in
the violence:”

Blue guitar
scything a
silver wake:
My spade
haft-deep
in shitty days
of pissy
tantrums &
drunk fucks:
That blue Hamer
Phantom
was both sheild
& sword of
the frosty
ghosts in
my heart: I
worked on songs
for hours, practiced
leads, hammered
salvos of chords
articulate in
the rage and
heartbreak I
could not find
words for: Used
my ex-girlfriend’s
gift to sing
her curses:
There in that
tiny bedroom
with just a
mattress & a
scatter of rumpled
cocksure
fineries &
winter bearing
down on the
windows cold
as a witch’s
cunt & lit
by a fugitive
moon which ravaged
the frets of
that blue blue
guitar: All of
me narrowed to
that inch and
a half of neck
stretching from
her body inside
that Hamer
out to the
void: When the
rhythms were
succinct my
heart galloped
on hooves
of angry fire
or collapsed
in a single
wrenching sob:
When I failed
to find the
teeter between
craft and flight
those windows
shattered & cold
cold lunar night
drowned me:
I was jerking
that guitar off
in mimesis
of some anti-
orgasmic flight,
a backwards plunge
from her blue
poisoned womb
down her sweet
briared furrow
to sprung up
in volcanic
fire into the
evernight of
refusal: Bereft
of the band
I had forged
and then of
the forgeries
of True Love
I was left with
only a
personal
poisoned shell
emptied of
all identity:
A freezing
guitar-shaped
pond encased in
a icy blue
case locked shut
against any
real grief, any
forward movement
beyond the moon
of loss to what
always follows:
That winter was
truly bad but
it was also
the alembic
out of which
formed my last
band, my last
songs: AA and
therapy wrote
it off too
quickly as
the Pit of
the Bottle and
the Mortis
of Compulsion
so the dolphin
drives me back
to find a vigor
and joy in
icy waters:

“There are
patterns of
self-recognition
formed by means
of horror and
obscenity,” Hillman,
“Blue:” “The soul’s
putrefactio
is generating
a new anima
consciousness,
a new psychic
grounding that
must include
underworld
experiences of
anima itself:
Her deathly and
perverse
affinities: The
dark blue of
the Madonna’s
robe bears many
shadows, and
these giver her
depths of
understanding:
Just as the
mind made on
the moon has
lived with Lilith
so that its
thoughts can
never be
naive, never cease
to strike deep
toward shadows:
Blue protects
white from
innocence:”

Son of love,
discover what
that arrow
that pierces
your heart
is truly aiming
for: Not
heart but the
art of
transfixion
& transfiguration:
The songs which
spilled out
of my broken
heart were inked
in the halcyon
stillness of
bitter winter
night, a
Fomorian breath
inside the
god Oran descends
to: Love is
never about
the Beloved
nor the boy
who just wishes
to Be Loved
but rather
about the icy
hot bolt fired
from afar by
an indifferent
cloudhopper:
Split wide, my
mouth bleeds
song: That
love doesn’t
want my health
or wholeness
or spiritual
good: It wants
to rivet me
to the back of a
silver dolphin
diving into
Norweigian
waters in a
bolt of black:
After I’ve sung
my verses it
will throw
me aside to age
& die while it
swims on through
the rest of
the world firing
lethal arrows
into unsuspecting
sudden lovers:
And on it goes:
The music of
those days
plays on in me
like a ghost
in my heart:
John Waite still
grabs me in
that killer
diller song “Forget
Me Not” he
sang with Bad
English: I will
be your keeper /
Your possess the
key / Forget me
not / Forget me
not / Cause you
belong to me / I
will be your
shadow / when
you walk away /
Forget me not /
Forget me not /
I will follow
you / Until your
dyin day: Such
is the ice hell
of eternal love:
My ex was long
gone to whatever
loves & losses
that made
& shattered
her but those
memories
forgive none
of their fire
& I carry along
ghosts like her
and other
doomed loves
like skulls
on my belt
or guitars
slung forever
over my shoulder:
That my worst
days & nights
are laid at
the altar of
love means
the devotions
were real although
the ablutions
were insufficient:
O blue robe of
the priestess
who impales me
with my own
dick pen guitar:
You are quite
a babe one
I may never
survive:



OK, the process of writing “Breviary” -- an autobiography of song, as it were, pieced together by guitars -- ended in a bad collapse. Did I write my way back into the old bad woods, or did I make the awful error of taking the numens far too literally. This poem was written shortly after I finished that long, unpublishable work, when I was far too literal in my littoral embrace of Lir. What did I expect?

CRUEL FISH

August 2000


Finned monster
from dark deeps
I fear to swim:
Making and
breaking my
heart with an
arrow’s pierce
& a departing
wave: You don’t
give a shit
about the sighs
you compose
in me nor
the lives which
decompose
in your wake:
How many times
have you
startled me
alive with
a woman’s
citrus blossom
smile then
shipwrecked
me for letting
my own
arrows fly?
How you
gloated over
the awful
minutes that
dragged to
eternally once
I lost myself
in her wood
& pined til
Doomsday
for her next
embrace:
How you
strutted like
cocky Achilles
on the waters
I drowned in
after she walked
away: O and
that miserable
dry dock
of empty
& motions
I employ to
recover from
you, telling
myself it was
all a lie,
a mania, mere
biologic ruse —
When I
grow smug
in my fresh
knowledge
and return
confident
to the day
then blam,
a wave crests
the sun
and you emerge
in a woman
barbed in your
cunning bow
to nail this
prince of
infidelity:
Then what?
All else is
impossibility:
Guilt, prayers,
relapse, grinding
desire, the torture
of minutes,
more guilt, hard
talk, loathing
to close the
door yet ever
demurring to
walk through it:
If I am your
son, then what
is my task? Must
I hurl up
waves of poems
taller than
my father’s stones?
Find motions
of ink which
bear the easy
slide & slish
of your finny
release?
And this
as every son
who knows deep
within he can
never truly
measure up
to the father:
Nor live a
life defined
by filial war:
What does it
mean to simply
accept the
father’s blessing
& curse &
just go on?
How to be
true to a nature
that loves to
hide? How to
love a cruel
mother sea
where is
tidal appetite?
How to ride
a dolphin’s
muse wherever
she trills & wills?
Look: I’m neither
smart nor
ballsy enough:
Just a big
sweet kid who
loves a wanton
peek & sniff:
But you have
bid me build
this towering
aerie where
all is safe
without so
you can gambol
within: It makes
for a very
boring life:
Heart in
service of
art is dry
& bloodless
indeed: My
wife & I
rarely fuck
but we conceive
new loves
& labors every
day: So why
are you
trumpeting to
me with the
jawbone of
an ass? Why
call me beyond
the pale of
what you would
have me sing?
Here I am
bent in half
trying to mortar
what goes beyond
passionate singing
& you belt me
with the most
passionate singing
of all: I know
it’s no use
crying Foul
but today I
wonder if I
was meant to
leave you behind:
Let the angel
go & grow
into a deeper
less sexual
mania: Trade
wave for wind:
And pace off
new territories
of sin: Or,
perhaps you’re
just reminding
me that the
way I think
it moves is
not the very
fish at all:
Each new poem
asks me to
let go in some
new way: So
too the life:
Upper and
lower worlds
are mirrors
of the other
but they’re
incompatible
in any other
way: Free here
walled there:
Angel above
demon below:
Song within
sex without:
Arrivals on
the page &
departures
every day:
Will my
heart never
stop breaking
each time I
remember these
things: And
will I ever
accept that
the only true
& adequate
response
to an angel’s
high rage
is to live
simply &
humanely:
Sighing the
wave when it
soars & weeping
when it crashes
on this
inexorable shore
& singing
all the way
again and again
til death do
I depart?
What do I
know? I’m
just a guitar
shaped mouth
swinging
south where
the dolphins roam:
You figure
it out:


***

This from the bottom of that dive:

SHATTERED GOLD

2000

Cold and windy and bright
like a shatter of gold
over mute stones. I live here.
My wife stands inside holding
the door yet unable to fathom why
I would leave her there.
Her face stricken and old
but still pausing. Still waiting.
All that I cannot reach
at that moment touching her
soft skin as I once had, so
so gently and protectively.
So patient. The cats inside
like whorls of an intensely
felt love, purring in the rich syrup
of sunlight. Blow, gold winds, in this
neighborhood I can not inhabit.
Blow me hard. Sailing back
into town down a brilliant
river of concrete, passing
impeccably smooth SUVs and
vans with their terrible
suburban freight of love’s
makings. Pass ‘em all,
no one can catch me!
“Take Five” on WUCF,
a jazz for my cruel cool shatter.
Last night we got drunk & drunker
in a country bar with your sister
and your ex-husband. Downing
those shots of Tequila, blossoming
dark gold. You and I danced
and danced like beggars on fire,
our bodies liquid in the yes we
hunger for but cannot reach.
Then you got sloppy drunk,
sitting on your ex’s lap professing
love and careening so wildly
outside that the cops gave me
a DUI test and packed us home
in a van. You thought the younger
cop was so cute. Would not, could
not say a word to me, who envelops
and rapes you just like every other
man who has risen in praise of your
sweet small body. Your indefensible
sex. Your passion which somehow
gilds disaster after disaster.
Home you undressed and curled
naked on the couch with your ex though
he was snoring drunk. And I with no
where else in the world I would
rather be, standing at the doorway
watching you descend from me,
addict of the fire which
breathes inside the worst and most
wayward reaches of the lovers’ other,
jealous of that udder of dark milk
you bear like fate, so greedy for
it I’d murder my own son for it,
fling my gold wide and wildly
for just one more sip, my jazz
the howl of all that in this
day’s cold shatter at
the end of everything I broke.

***

This poem was written toward the end of it, when I realized I was back deep in the belly of the whale with no way out -- again --

THE WRECK OF THE
INDIANOPOLIS

August 2001

Two torpedoes
struck us amidships
and then we were
in the water,
1200 orphans
thrown to the ocean
like a thimble of fates.

Days we prayed for
cool nights, nights we
cursed our icy beds.
The sky empty and
wild, a gate for souls
opening from below.

On the second day
the sharks found us
and fed with impunity.
One guy a few yards
from me was dragged
down in a churn
of bubbles. He floated
back up a few minutes
later, freed of his guts,
his eyes dreaming
white horizons.

On the third day
only 300 of us were left.
Man, I was ready
to let go the clinging,
just ladder on
that mile or two
of black falling.

A plane approached in
the sky. Some swam
toward it, others
let go right then,
winnowed from us
by some invisible calm.

I survived the wreck
of the Indianopolis,
one of the last pulled
that day from the drink.
Every night for
50 years I’ve gone
to sleep falling back
into that sea’s dark mouth,
ready at last to begin.


***

This poem was written 6 month later, after I sobered up again, slowly began amends to life and wife, and looked at that wild dark askance - with a tempered edge, so to speak --


AHAB SANS WHALE

Dec. 2001

Imagine Ahab without
his rage: some kind
old coot, a father to
us all, steering the
boat far from
the wake of Leviathan.
Surely a book no longer.

There were great
poems in a howling wind.
Now there’s only
small breezes at
first light over still
waters. Nothing
you could hang
a smoking hat on.

And yet I find
a music between the waves
just out of reach.
My shoulder remembers
the last harpoon.
That choiring quiet
where the ship
went down in
a round spreading
wake is the vowel
opening the next day.


***

And -- FINALLY -- this poem is of that wilderness moved inside, where it always belonged ...

***


TEAJACK

Sept. 2005

Salt and foam careen the surge
which carries me toward You
upon this lurch of fin and tooth
and pale white spermacetti fire.
Teajack is my name, tar of
every Southern coast, a brawn
of blue maraud. In my cup
of passage I was brined
in whiskey’s womb, then
hung a year upon a sea-dam’s
stake where noctals washed my
mind for good; wakened
like a conch upon a shattered beach,
I began these spiral sing-songs home.
I ride from shore to shore upon
the backs of uddered waves,
a stone skipped across the sea
from bed to bed to bed of blue.
Each night torn from Your abyss
sings the starry depth of God
before He ripped his name
pure from Your vocal chords.
Each morning wakes with
dew on these hands, the sweat
of sweet breasts which milked
now brighten this next shore
with a pearly, sated light.
Here is the undiscovered
country I never thought I’d find, that
home inside the wildest heart
I always meant to ride but feared.
I begin here, a bluer salt, to harrow
all found in that water, even to the
ninth most fatal wave.
The crash of surf booms
down the shore like the welcome
of an old friend at the door,
of shark and queen composed:
the womb inside my pen’s blue sense
now shouting in wild resonance.

Galahad

The third and final stage in the development
of the Quest motif is dominated by Galahad
(Galaad), renowned for his unparalleled
purity and excellence ... As the son of
Launcelot he is perfect; he has never failed,
nor does he in his quest for the Holy Grail.
In most versions he reaches the castle,
achieves the Grail, and then just disappears.
He fulfills his destiny and then leaves
this world in an ethereal blaze of glory.

-- “The Fisher King,”
www.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/grail/fisher/


I.

When Arthur’s court sat to meat
on the eve of Pentecost
there was a clap of thunder
which pealed in pearly light
across the faces of the startled
knights. A door opened and He
walked in, the brightest knight
of all, the end of every quest
to bleed from dripping quills.
He found that chair inside the Round
which none had tried before
without a siege of horrors;
and sat sedately down. You’d
think he’d drawn Excalibur
from stone the way the court
gasped and stared at him,
sitting there as easy as you please,
with those blue eyes so icy bright
and fey and bottomless. All were
amazed to see the fate and character
Camelot meet in words of him
athrone that evil chair.
The youth sat silent (almost as if
in dream) as the old man who led
him in told the Round of the youth’s
lineage back through Launcelot
and thence down a dizzy stair,
each father like a floor or door
each sire darker and older than
the last--Merlin back to Taleissin
to their totem shaman to his
stag-head god, Manuin down
through his tidal rhythmus back
to every father’s shore; down
into the titan sea of Lir
blackening league to league to Mer
-- A host of dragon-rouges
no sword of men could best
nor woman’s thighs desist.
And thus the greatest quest
imagined by that court was
bequeathed to him,
the fairest son of all, who
wreathed a blueblack ardor
behind a samite, bloodless brow.

II.

They bid him stay; but the news
of Grail had roused the rose
bed in his heart in a riot of
sweet bloom. He ran from every
room. All Camelot grieved to watch
him mount his great white
horse and thunder off, disappearing
like a setting sun into the
forest dark just beyond.
After four days’ ride he
crossed a white chapel where
a hermit bid him stay, producing
from behind an altar a
great white shield which
had waited millennia for him.
As he rode on that shield
blared like an enmooned sun
in the dark, shielding all it
shadowed in his lap.
On the shield’s centre was a bright
red cross, the wet cry of
every savior doused in fire’s
white thunder. Blood’s shield
it was, carotid and infernal,
mixing every pure and pagan
pulse in its round. In the
Grail lore there’s always
the blend of imp and angel,
the one both sire and dark
lover of the next. Thus Uther
yielded Arthur; and Niniane
vexed Merlin into horns of
stone; thus Launcelot
founded Galahad in his
betrayal of his lord with
Guenievere, his sword
drenched in that mere
which fed the uterus which
delved Christ to Calvary.
Each alternation -- angel
wing then devil’s cock --
spins the carriage wheels which
ferries dead lords across
the sea to rest at last on
that crystal bier at the
bottom of Grail’s dark
golden well. Every previous
tale sped Galahad on his way.
And where all the other knights
somehow always lost their way
in tangled brakes of pride
and lust, He (or whoever
wrote of him at last) rode
straight on through to
its jeweled square, there
at a clearing in the center
of the woods next to a loch
too deep to harrow with a name.
The portcullis raised for him as
it does only once in three
hundred songs; he crossed the
evil moat, whispering Uffington
to calm his nervous mount.
As his blue eyes pierced the
gloom ahead, the aura of his shield
startled and fanned out to pyre
he and his horse in a moony sear
of post-Pentacostal light.
Inside the realm he rode, dismounted,
and walked on, earth’s light to
heaven’s dark: A found the chancel deep
within where a maiden waited holding
the gold vessel in her hands. Galahad
grasped it with Grail in both hands,
lifting it to our lips at last,
flooding the world in wild red light,
pouring down a perilous sweetness
like a first and last enduring kiss.

III.

That story now replete in mine,
I stir in my white writing chair,
aware now of first light warming
in the windows. Our cat sits in one
scenting the garden’s news while
a red pickup truck hurries
up the avenue, a Red Knight
roaring out to fray the same
old same old day. I’m emerging
from an ever-noctal wood with
my words still dripping with its brine,
my hair like seaweed scattered
on a shore, my eyes refocusing
at last. I’m writing my way home
upon the tide called Galahad
so many years ago,
a brilliant artery far beneath
the foam-backed lines of ink I write
in swank similitude of a
blacker, darker, deeply more sexual
verse. I’m questing in the way which
grails by widdershins,
completing every ache of old
with backward whets against
a black stone fished from
deeps offshore the Iona
I have only dreamed.
He is now the old man
who leads the way into
your rounded room, proffering
to me the seat prepared for
us that night when Uther
spermed his enemy’s boudoir,
spiralling hot dragons in the soak
of Arthur’s storied womb.
My Grail was cast in that infernal
cry: I pour it here and freely
on the day’s soft infant thighs,
a rosy dark peculiar juice
arousing every word I cry.

Going Down

SONG TO LIR

Oct. 30, 2005

I’m still in thrall with those bad
old nights. Black fiddles still
saw swoony and fey that
big night music in my reverie;
something lurches when I
recall the thrill of driving headlong
into the darkest rooks of town,
scenting something blonde and
bloodlike in the night breeze rushing
through the opened windows
of my car, the ions of summer
storm and surf igniting my
neural ramparts, like St. Elmo’s
Fire, with the eerie wattage
of danger and booze and sex.
That blue alchemy was the
quintessence of my Faustian
dive into LaLaLand, pouring
myself in votive jolting jets
down into the badassed
veld of all Black Mothers,
emerging, come some
blatant, pagan dawn,
like a phallus guled
with Thalassan gore.
Certainly all that is
nothing to fall too much in
love with again, else I fall again
in all those hurtful ways.
Yet in that gnarly bad-booze
brew a crystal bed lay far
down out of view; at the heart
of those dark quests lay the
the hope of finding once again that
bright grail of clear blue love
which in all the years of
roaming and ravening I had
blundered on two or three
too-brief essential times,
each a milky pure enactment
which washed me more
cleaner of my arrears
than when I was baptized in the
sea at Melbourne Beach
when puberty shot me forth.
Perhaps that soft-glo bed
of Perfect Love was just the
golden carrot of a darker
more selfish appetite for More;
I certainly crept out of
far too many beds
at the far ends of those nights
believing Love -- the free-fall,
lucky type -- was nowhere
on that rumpled snoring shore.
All that is true, but these
days another thought begins
to form that the whole of that
gambol between savage lust
and starry love was just the
foolish half I too much believed,
meant by godlike hands whose
ends were mine, as if
my enbrined sense could drink
a goddess night to dregs.
A Puritan error I have so many
drowned fathers to thank, I think.
I come to sense now that while
I dissembled like an Actaeon on
down those bad years, ever more
mauled and shredded by my own howls
for love in a wilderness of rock taverns
and boob bars and and bottle clubs,
some darker underside was nursing
from me, not so much from my acts
but the desires which teated them,
growing more visible as a shape defined up from an
enormous sea which is the greatest
part of me, a whale which grazed
upon on my yearning midnight stare.
While I banged on to ruinous ends
it lurched and followed, devouring
every whiskey bottle, bra and guitar
pick I flung over a shoulder toward
forgetfulness, each a wafer of communion
which slowly woke his soul in mine,
night after night, acre after fathom
of that watery abyss. And then one
night I found us somehow one,
my slipping & sliding & oh so
wounded feet astride his hoary back.
Back then the endless drinking felt
like I had fallen in the whale,
but now I sense that I had just
found a footing there where falling
is the precipice of everything
desire bid me lose. Weirdly too
I sense I’ve yet to hit the real
bottom of that sea, years now
after the last bad boozing night.
There were years in which I
boarded up against all beams
of wet wild night; then years of
reparation for the guilt and shame
by living well and deep. There came
hard education where I learned
that love could not become itself
till I forsook all hope of pouring
it its perfection from a bottle,
babe, and bed. Amid all that
I felt him there, dangerous and
wild, a dark layer of endless
ache which no prayer could
fleece or flay. Now I sense I’m
simply heading deeper as the
two of us swim on. I think
of those old nights and,
with no actual desire to lose
myself in them again, sigh and
swish the liquor of it here,
feasting with stained chops
upon its taste of endlessness,
hauling on huge nipples of
forever-sweeter more, invoking
that blackout in the beast
which parks me on the shore
of Paradise. Yes -- oh feel that
dark immensity lurch deep
within, free and feral in the
deepest nacre of the thrall,
cresting a huge wave in a shower
of moon silver to spume spermatic
fire defiant toward the sky,
crashing down with all the massy
freight of an old, emphatic joy.
And that is just the surface part,
for he dives deeper than what
sight I’ve learned to toss. The limbic
sea he swims on down and back
I will never fully sound, much
know how many million years
he thrusts and fins the verbs.
I’m writing here truly as I’m
riding him, a silly dram
of wakeful ocean on a course
of endless waves, boy cupid
with this tiny flute astride
the night’s Leviathan.
Carve me on the upmost
arch of his coat of arms. Hang
us on the headboard of every
bed I’ve held a woman in.
Carve us on the gravestone
where at last I’m fully wed.
And to every savage fantasy
I hold like whiskey on my tongue,
may his loll like the clabber
which all night bells are rung.





If it were permissible to personify the Unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change, the present world meaning neither more nor less to him than any year in the the one hundredth century before Christ; he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasurable experience, would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe, and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay.

-- CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of A Soul, 215

***

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

-- Fiona Macleod, Iona, p. 83)


Eros was considered a god whose divinity transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in any way. I might, as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love. Eros is a kosmogonos,, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel that Paul’s words -- “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love” -- might be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself ... Love “bears all things and endures all things” (I Corinthians 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogic “love.”

-- CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 353-4

"Blood Is Such Peculiar Juice": Creative Mythology's Grail

Samhuin 2005

Recently a member of the Joseph Campbell Mythology Group posted an interesting assay on blood which got my own scarlet juices flowing, so to speak.

That dialogue I provide here as a fair transfusion of what Joseph Campbell called “creative mythology,” the alchemy of mythological tradition inside the individuated psyche. Although rudiments, of the old traditions remain, the creative tradition demands that the individual make their own path through the trackless forest wherein the Grail is found -- not in eternity nor the future nor the dissembled past, but in what we make of all those things inside our own hearts.

I’m coming to accept that that work -- to articulate what has been excavated and grounded and grown inside me -- has eclipsed to large degree any other ambition I formerly held as a poet vying for attention from the academy or presses, or as a scholar seeking credence for his excavations. All that careerist stuff is so old-school: Let’s sing the gods forward! Let’s bathe in their blood, and rejoice in their wild quintessence! If this is mystery religion, let’s bibble the sibyl til her riddles dribble from our kibibbles!

OK -- My uncoagulate enthusiasm is leaking here—let me re-frame the door into my theme with the following from Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (Penguin Arkana, 1991):

“Just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world—where the application of science to the fields of practical life has not dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again —each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, ‘Know thyself,’ is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every “thou” on earth is the center of the world, in the sense of that formula just quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as ‘an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.’” (35)

I not so much awaken to this work as am roused to it: every word I’ve set to paper from my creative centers have ached for it; the dark velds I’ve probed and named and shored and welled have grown identified with it, much as the Guardians of Iona once told my father, “Your work is our work and our work is your work.” And while I today call this numen a creative mythology, that may only be the spectrometer which allows me to better see a greater shape in the dark. In his essay “Circles,” Emerson wrote, “Our life is an apprentiship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

***

Discussion had been touching on themes from the Grail Cycle— the Fisher King and his wounds, the melding sexuality of the story, and how both women and men both hook deeply into the tale, as if the story spoke to something beneath gender.

Here is the post from a member who uses the screen name of Isabel del Tierra. I reprint it here with her permission.

***

The Mythos of Blood
Isabel del Tierra
JCMG discussion group
post dated 10/21/2005

The recent discussions of the grail and its lore sparked, for me, a round of musings on the elixir for which the grail is the vessel. Or maybe it is the nearness of the Celtic celebration of samhain and All Hallows Eve that turned my thinking toward the mythos of blood, that precious water that is life.

Kings and queens, rulers and peers, all reckon their descendency from the divine by right of the blood flowing through them. When two people agree to wed, in essence there is an agreement to the mingling of their respective heritages, the blending of two long lines of fortuitous meetings, matings, and marryings, joined in a third that takes life as children or as a commitment lasting until there is no life left for either (ostensibly). We measure ancestry by blood quantum, how near or far we are from the fullest measure of identification with a particular land or people. We are full-blooded when our ancestors’ parentage is known or recorded for posterity and history or when we move through our days impassioned by the fiery blush of living that emboldens our acts. Our closest genetic relations are our blood relatives; blood is reckoned to be thicker than water when we number those we count as family. To adopt deep ties to someone who falls outside the charmed circle of intimate bonded connection, the flesh is rent, blood is drawn and mixed, to serve as the pigment of a sacred tattoo that creates blood brothers or sisters.

When speaking of the ultimate sacrifice warriors make for their tribes or nations, the act is reckoned in willingness to shed selfless hero blood for kith and kin, nation and neighbor, or spill the enemy’s blood, fertilizing the acres of the battlefields with the very fluid that fuels the limbs of combat.

Women, in accord with their own lunar dominated cycles, shed blood each month. In ancient societies, the shedding of what was intended as the nourishing field for life to come prompted women to be segregated from the community, to live apart, refrain from cooking meals, or participating in rituals or rites until this unused power fled the body. We are born in a wash of red and the vibrancy of our beings is measured in the vitality of the rubied river running through us. In the mystery mythology of the dead and rising divinity, the cleansing, purifying sacrifice of the one is by symbolistic alchemy transformed into the meal of the bread and blood symbolizing earth’s fecund field and flood, that yields the life vivifying sustenance to feed hearts and minds.

In modern times, it is possible to anonymously mingle our essence with those we will never meet without promise, pledge, or claim of kin through offering up the primal fluid of us for transfusion into someone else’s body. We may pass elements of ourselves slumbering in the marrow of a stranger on the street, who knows? In the lore of the vampire, Nosferatu sidles through the sloughs of ever existing twilight by taking from living beings the wine of the body’s cup.

That we are all, every one, gifted with this potion that surges through us, carrying breath to bone and bowel, each day, in a circle of nourishing tides, that lift, crash, and abate in our inner oceans, marks us as mirrors of what we see without in the form of our parent planet where great landmasses mark their ends on shores confining seas. To be this universe in body is to be a unique vessel. Aren’t we, each, the grail? ...




“Blood is such peculiar juice”
JCMG discussion group
Brendan MacOdrum
October 23, 2005

Thanks for the early All-Hallows celebration with your reverie. Odd that it occurs here, in the bloodless rooks of cyberspace, where there is no blood connection, no living presence, not even a drop of actual world in the words: And yet your post washes rich and deep and vivid with that brightest, stickiest, most vital substance of all, enriching and elivening this reader’s imagination.

Blood begets blood, thus my bloody reply. From the jugular you locate, this gout ... Apologies for the length, but much blood must flow before circulating this Theme through its round.

That such life can be abundant even only in the words tells me that nature and our nature are not lost between the lines but are richest there, capable of infusing and nourishing and washing clean the daily round, pumping adrenaline when necessary, blissing with dopamines, coagulating old wounds, and at last soothing the fret with a narcoleptic softness, blurring every border and surface til we drift down to sleep where the dark battens on us.

Pairing imagination with blood locates mind in the heart, a conceit that James Hillman writes at length in his essay “The Thought of the Heart.” It’s an oddly right grounding (or recentering), bringing mind down from the haven of its heaven to root it in the immortally desiring and loving heart. If you think of the Grail as a round vessel on a square pedestal, such uniting is weirdly logical, a wholeness arrived at through the assay of its extremes.

“Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts,” he writes, “because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels and the imagination leads us astray from both. Even when the heart is allowed its reasons, they are those of faith or of feeling, for we have forgotten that philosophy itself -- the most complex and profound demonstration of thought -- is not ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ in any abstract sense of ‘sophic.’ Rather, philosophy begins in a “philos” arising in the heart of our blood, together with the lion, the wound, and the rose. If we would recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy.”

And in the following paragraph I think he locates a Grail-spot, deep in the thinking heart:

“Philosophy enunciates the world in the images of words. It must arise in the heart in order to mediate the world truly, since, as {Henry} Corbin says, it is that subtle organ which perceives the correspondences between the subtleties of consciousness and the levels of being. This intelligence takes place by means of images which are a third possibility between mind and world. Each image coordinates within itself qualities of consciousness and qualities of world, speaking in one and the same image of the interpenetration of consciousness and world, but always and only as image which is primary to what it coordinates. This imaginal intelligence resides in the heart: ‘intelligence of the heart’ connotes a simultaneous knowing and loving by means of imagining.”

So also your post was a Grail assay, rounded and grounded in all the ways you run with the image of blood as that mysterium which flows from the Grail through us all. And like those writers of the Romances long ago, one tale begets another, accreting toward the fully-fledged myth, devling back that chalice which can only be drunk from when the right question has finally been asked, discovering its true name and source.

***

Your question is surely a good one —what that wonderfully hidden and revealed vessel holds. IMO the Grail mixes of two great traditions in its magic draught, the Celtic and the Christian. It is the cauldron of rebirth which Manannan possesses, capable of regenerating dead heroes overnight in its depths; it is the cup which Jesus drank from the at the Last Supper, which He said was filled with his own blood; all who drank from that cup would be saved from death by his immortal life-blood.

As Manannan's cauldron, is only revealed, like the spiral castle of Caer Sidi, at special times of the year, on that day outside of time—All Hallows, the eve of the Celtic New Year, which we celebrate as Halloween. On that night time is suspended and the veil thins to gossamer between living and dead; the spirits issue from their passage graves and the collective tongues of ancestry whisper and moan in the air. You don’t know who walks with you down those lonely country lanes home, what corpse you carry on your shoulders. The dead live on in our blood, they depend upon it, our living ferries a great past forward.

Have you ever sensed that primal antiquity breathing hoarsely behind you? It freezes the blood. There is a terror in that collective, totem presence. The Fisher King in the old tradition is Bran, lord of the Island of the Everliving; he is also Nodens, a sea-god of Celtic Britain that means “fisher,” as when sea fishes the surface for men; so there is a sense that the dead are reaching up for us, desperate for our blood. Jessie Weston notes that there are not one but two kings in the Grail Castle, the Maimed King in the foreground, and another king, much older, in an unseen room, into which the Grail is carried and from which it again returns. Old and older gods reside down the cauldron grail of Manannan.

But when the Grail is imaged from the new dispensation as Christ’s seeping heart, a new heaven and earth becomes possible through an individual relation independent of history. I don’t doubt that the Christ appeared when ties to the older faith (less necessary than before as consciousness evolved) had become sterile and oppressive. Each penitent receives the heavenly host on the tongue and washes it down with a transubstantiate earthly blood. History is erased through salvation, the debt of Eden finally paid off. Individual sacrifice of ego repeats the sacrifice of Jesus, atoning for the sin of difference which every ego commits. The blood of sacrifice is spiritualized, God’s covenant renewed. We begin again as if reborn: the past is cancelled; white light annihilates the dread connection we once had with night. All Hallows becomes All Saints, the victory of St. Michael and St. Francis and St. Brigid over the Manannans and Cernunnoses and Bridgids of old blood. They are cast down the abyss, but only Christian rhetoric can keep them there.

Certainly the hitching of diverse traditions in the Grail creates an uneasy marriage. Primal and future god aren’t sure what to do with each other. As a midpoint between matriarchal consciousness (dominated by the unconscious) and patriarchal consciousness (dominated by the solar ego), Sol and Luna embrace in quicksilver, their numens and qualities shifting rapidly, emitting weird harmonics. Opposition and sympathy play out at once. The one is never quite sure what to do with the other. At times they’re more like brothers feuding for the soul They wear each others faces, sometimes demonic, sometimes angelic. Sometimes the vessel shines with possibility, other times it has the gleam of everything forever lost.

As you all probably know, one of my favorite tales has to do with the sacrifice of St. Oran in the footers of St. Columba’s abbey to appease the water-lord who had been disturbed by the cutting of the sward at Iona. His feast day is Oct. 27. In one version of the tale, he travels three nights into the underworld of the old Celtic tradition, seeking Manannan, the sea god he was sacrificed to. On Oct. 31, curious to hear the news from his buried friend, Columba has Oran’s head interred. Oran’s eyes fling open and the mouth speaks the ghastly words: “There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” Horrified, the saint had Oran buried again at all haste, yet goes on to appoint Oran the tutelary guardian of the abbey’s graveyard, saying, “No man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran.” It’s a good Halloween story.

Anyhow, Columba's curiosity about the past he buries in Oran is weirdly echoed in a tale in which a chalice used by the Iona abbey is broken. It is taken by one of the monks to the sea-god Manannan, who magically restores the chalice by blowing on it. He sends it back to Columba with a question: would he achieve Christian immortality? "Alas," says the ungrateful saint, "there is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!" The message is returned to Manannan, who breaks out into an indignant lament. "Woe is me, Mannan-mac Lir! For years I’ve helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I’ll do it no more, till they’re weak as water. I’ll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland."

And Manannan skedaddles, making way for the new Christian church. But rather than fade entirely, Manannan - and all the gods of the lost dispensation—live on in the borderland, on the far islands and to the north, at the bottom of the great sea of Lir.

The grail somehow holds together those two traditions, enervated and ruddy with glow of two bloods. What pours from the grail is a wild wine indeed.

***

Do I digress? Blood has its own circuit to assay, and its tides wax and ebb in plural conceivings. So to move on:

If a royal blood flows through our veins, like Perceval we have to quest a long time to discover the true nature of that heritage and lineage. All manner of untruth has to be unlearned along the way, both fictions of ignoble parentage (whispered in our ears by “false” parents) and ruinous fantasies of knighthood. We have to grow up a long way to get to the Hermit in the wood who tells us who we really are; have to be frustrated in the quest and bitter with God for the task; its very arduousness tasks the ardor of our hearts, the longing and ache which sent us forward in the first place.

Such lineage is especially odd in mongrel America. Who isn’t 1/16th this and a 32d that and a seven-64th whatever, fractious fractions which add up to us, bastards of all culture? Whatever actual royal blood has long been spilled on westward tracks. Yet the fantasy of such lineage grips Americans, carefully writing down family histories, trying to get to the sources of genealogy. Both of my parents have royal stories, my mother of a family of Scots warlords who lost their family name in a border dispute, my father’s distant fathers royal entertainers in Ireland with a king or two thrown into the savagery. That imagined history somehow survives all of the moves and divorces and greenwood marriages, the actual blood of history. Royal blood is imagined, and it seems to flow through us all. It is not valved by actual history but from our imagined ones, from courtly romances, from the Mabinogion, from the ghostly choir assembled in our skull.

Tribal blood runs thin indeed, replaced by larger and louder affinities -- nation (perhaps), certainly our pop-cultural cherry-Coke wash, all sugar and no gules. Few these days aren’t in the congregation basked by cathode rays, drinking from that chalice that is television. Yet what the Lord giveth that way, He taketh away in the other; so many elders rot in nursing homes, and suburb and ghetto both are darkly fatherless, deprived of manly blood. Desire and selfishness have brutalized so many children, bloodying them with our digressions and errancies.

So many shadowy quests attend this questing thirst for what pours from the Grail. The devil’s hooch, like fools’ gold, brims from every too-shining glass. We try stealing the sacred blood from others (with a vampyre’s tooth), we brew our own bastard fabulations of it (the Frankenstein grimacing behind every creator’s desire to create life), we try to use its power against others (like those Nazi snakes in Indiana Jones #3, or those fundamentalist fascists wielding Bibles like axes). As a lack, it will drive you insane for more. I think here of those crystal meth addicts in San Francisco who are whirling swastikas of death, insatiable knights of AIDS spiking infection rates in their sleepless quests for release. And there is our gross taste for Murder Most Foulle, the bloodstained daggers which harrow the imagination of Macbeth, making his estate Hell Castle and the knocking at the gate the very sound of doom:

Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Such blood-spattered poetry —“the very painting of fear”—is infectuous; we dare not look but cannot stop staring. Macbeth imagines but Lady Macbeth becomes mad, her senses “sightless,” walking in her sleep, compulsively washing blood from her hands that isn’t there. The spilled blood of Duncan drives her from the ramparts; glutted on his bloody tale, Macbeth becomes insensate to his fate:

I have supp’d full well with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.

The tragedy of blood transfixes us, affixes us to the sacrificial spot, arousing horror and harrowing the sense. Tragedy’s roots are soaked in blood, the primal drama arises from the death and dismemberment of the god. Elemire Zolla wrote in his essay “The Vision of the Rose” in an old issue (XII) of Parabola,

“When revelers tore the goat to pieces and fed on its flesh, Dionysos was eating himself, sacrificing himself out of love, out of cosmic completeness. The song (‘oide’) that sang of this sacrifice was tragedy, the divine goat’s song: Through the frenzy, the horror and the pity of tragedy, Dionysos became Apollo once more.”

And thus Jesus is sacrificed on the cross, anointed on his own throne of blood. He is torn from this life back to the other, mortal no more. I think here of those dayglo images of Crucifixion from the Catholic Church, his wounds gory, the entire tableau of Golgotha splattered with blood. The goat song hung on a cross: the ancient tragedy carried forward.

That new story was updated with Anfortas, the Fisher King, lying on his bier of pain, his sexual wound bleeding and bleeding, nothing on earth to coagulate the flow, no physic for the pain. What a bloody bed that must have been ... And the Four Hallows of the Grail -- bleeding lance, broken sword, serving dish (which in some versions bore a severed head), the Grail filled with the Saviour’s gules -- all are bloody symbols.

Blood everywhere there and little of it here. How drained of that red we have grown! Our wars are far, our meat comes to us washed clean of its butchery and is arrayed on white sytrofoam, our communion wine (in the Protestant blanch) is filtered of Bacchus, leaving somewhat sour grape juice. So much of this horrifying and vital substance has been bandaged from view. Can we understand sacrifice without the raw fact the blood it must spill so wantonly and tragically? Only on Halloween do we revel in it, screaming hilariously through cardboard mazes of faux-living dead with their absent appendages and Technocolor gore.

(The vitality of our literature—if it is to survive -- must somehow find a way back into blood. I would offer Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) as evidence that such work is still possible. For an examination of that book, see the post “Bloody Business”)

But its a dead god we’re trickertreating over, a lost divinity, egressed, perhaps through those fakey wounds, out through the weariness of bloodless prose. What can postmodernism offer to the questor lost in the forest? — “There’s no way out, there’s no way in, there’s no way, there’s no out or in, just barge on, it makes for a story anyway.” For many, the Christian Church is dead, and is added to the loam of dead gods, heaped upon Manannan and Dionysos and Bromios the bull-god and so many others whose names have slipped from human tongues. The underground castle where all of these divinities are found is the Grail Castle, the keep of all that wounding and dying. Do old gods fall, or do they just fade away?

Neither: they live one, darkly; that dark blood still roars in the jugular! Marie Louise von-Franz writes in CG Jung: His Myth in Our Time,

“When the god ‘dies’ (turning dark and negative in the upper world) he goes down to the secret underworld, where he is transformed. On resurrection his first appearance is in the form of a phallos ... The strange connection between the Christ-image and the subterranean nature-spirit which on the one hand seems identitical with Christ but on the other seems a hidden adversary of Christ engaged Jung’s attention all his life.”

(Very interesting then if sexuality is the pulse of that old outrageous god, defiant of transcendence, of the white havens above, greedy and rude, irrupting every civilized tea party with a tumescent roar.)

The Grail is a paradox, a circle housed on a square, filled with the blood of life from a dying god; it is a cup, chalice, or deep dish; it serves up a meal, it is meant to be drained; it is the goal of every quest which can never be found; it is housed in a place which is and is not. It is an alchemical quintessence, a marriage of elements, the elixir which makes one young. The Hermit explains to Parceval in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version of the tale,

“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 years, 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. Its other name is the Graal.

One derivation of the word “grail” comes from the Latin gradis + al, a “gradual” or “gradient,” as when a series of bowls are placed one above or behind the other. We enter numerous cauldrons of renewal as we quest room to room through the dream: sometimes a cup, sometimes a skull, sometime a womb, sometimes a grave. Our quest names these numens in succession. Maybe we complete one work to approach the next; having named one god we move on to name the next. Or it’s a via negativa, rejecting each next vessel as not it either, travelling with Oran shore to shore in search of Mannnan, learning all the way (as Rilke put it, being pinned, like Jacob, by successively greater angels).

Seeking to tap that font of everlivin’ blood, we enter our life’s fray. The Grail castle is out there somewhere, our blood tells us, somewhere deep in the forest, holding the key to our own transcendent perfection. But the error of the errant knight is that we pay too literal attention to blood’s song, foraying out in so many fruitless ways, chasing the Grail’s gold in projection, shining on external faces, the fascia of curve and curl, the dapplement and delirium of artificial pearls and real swine. A lot of folks never emerge from that forest; it is said that those who find the Grail but aren’t ready yet to receive it are transmogrified by it.

At some midpoint, exhausted by that fruitless quest, halfway through our life’s forest, when all seems hopeless and futile—perhaps when we give up on our certainty of knowing what we’re about— the numens begin to change and invert. We begin to realize that that the shining castle isn’t to be found in any literal place, between any literal thighs, not in any book that can be read or any lucre that can be spent. What we begin to sense is that the forest is in our imagined hearts. The goal we seek is not the end of so many contests and battles but comes from achieving a noble heart. In the end, clout has bend a knee to humility.

The treasure hardest to attain is our own individuation, wholeness, integration, enlightenment, call it what you will. It is a long and suffering process of slowly repealing all of the old declarations and gospels. We remove the capital letters which used to give mom and dad such power over us —Mary Queen of Heaven and Zeus no more. We painfully separate cupidity from eros, Venus from Psyche, the immortal goddess from the human woman, the faulty human flautist Marsyas from shining Apollo. We spiritualize sexuality and sexualize spirituality, healing back those far dominions toward a shared porous center.

Jung wrote, “Individuation is an expression of that biological process -- simple or complicated as the case may be -- by which everything becomes what it was destined to be in the beginning.” “The goal of individuation,” sez Marie Louse von Franz, “... represents a kind of mid-point or center in which the supreme value and greatest life-intensity are concentrated. It cannot be distinguished from the images of the supreme value of the various religions.”

Thus we find our Grail, the rounded center of the self. von Franz again: “It appears as: the ‘inner castle’ (Teresa of Avila), a four-square city or garden, the scintilla animae (Hans Hoy), the imago Dei in the soul, the ‘circle whose periphery is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,’ a crystal, a stone, a tree, a vessel or a cosmic order, or (Eastern) a ‘void’ filled with meaning.”

Those images arrive when, “instead of being a fragmented person who has to cling to collective supports, (the individual) now becomes a self-reliant whole human being who no longer needs to live like a parasite off his collective environment, but who enriches and strengthens it with his presence.”

Your closing rondo on blood’s cycle in the womb of the world is apt for my coming full circle here, at the beginning and end of rebirth. Blood got us here, blood will take us out; the tidal circulation of embrace and release which brings every human into existence washes us through the cycles of a life, innocent and then not, errant then wizened, taking life out of life and then sowing it back. “Blood is quite peculiar juice,” sez Goethe’s Mephistopheles, demanding that Faust seal his pact with the devil by signing his name in blood. The gods are fascinated with our blood and don’t quite seem to know what to do with it. They demand sacrifice, whether it is the goat torn in the horror and ecstasy of Dionysos, or the passion of God’s son on the cross, or casting Oran into the maw of Manannan. Our blood keeps Them alive and vital; when their names die from our tongues They die too. When we have quested long and bitterly enough in the forest of fictions and thrall —when we are wounded enough to lose those adolescent dreams of perfect achievement— blood cries for a reverse physic.

In Malory’s version of the Grail Quest, when Galahad and a company of knights are at last revealed the Hallows of the Grail, they then turn to the shining vessel, which is seated on a silver square table:

“Then looked they and saw a man come out of the holy vessel, that had all the signs of the passion of Jesu Christ, bleeding all openly, and said, ‘My knights and my servants and my true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secrets and of my hidden things; now hold and receive the high meat which ye have desired.’”

After receiving communion, Galahad is instructed to take the Grail and the rest of the Hallows with him across the sea to the Fisher King, where he is to anoint the entire body of that maimed lord with the lance that has not stopped bleeding since it pierced the side of Jesus. The very instruments by which we wounded ourselves so terribly and with ourselves, the world—ego, libido, ferally sharp and merciless—become, in the ministrations of the Grail elixir, the very physic of wounds. As Jung put it, “the power ‘which always wishes evil’ thus creates a spiritual life.”

You write: “That we are all, every one, gifted with this potion that surges through us, carrying breath to bone and bowel, each day, in a circle of nourishing tides, that lift, crash, and abate in our inner oceans, makes us a mirrors of what we see without in the form of our parent planet where great landmasses mark their ends on shores confining seas. To be this universe in body is to be a unique vessel. Aren’t we, each, the grail?”

Indeed we are! How good it is to quest through personal parentage and the accidents of birth and scarred history, turning all the wounds of life back into wombs, and rebirthing, like the sun, from the reddened sea of dawn—and to look with fresh eyes upon this magnificent world in which we live, as the eyes by which the world sees itself, as the heart which is fed to the fire of gods, as this old tale of totems and taboos, ten thousand mothers and fathers a-choir in our blood, in what we birth in the most furious uterus of all—this tort and alembic and umbilicus of words, enriched with the imagination of blood in its dark and scarlet joy. We hunt for its deepest sources, seeking to plunge our sense into it like Ahab’s fiery harpoon. Getting to the thick of it, the raw feast of the goat-song, staining our chops to the ears. This is the meat, the host, the ritual meal which is raised to the lips of god, us partaking of Him (or Her) as He (She) from us. Blood is thick but the veil is thin where it has been poured; therefore it is good to vigil a night in the cemetery where the gods are all buried, deep, oh so deep in the heart. Thus we still and ever commune with gods.

Theurgical Liturgical

Call to Worship

Ah to be baptised in the blood of this Hallows; to walk the cold lanes where the dead freely pour from the night’s split seams; to troop along, singing in a lost tongue every silver blue air of the depths which will save us from Newton’s sleep: Yes, that is a work to be about, amid the drone of the everyday, where so much disappears into overbright white noise; where technologies race at the speed of light toward the black hole we become. A work which only has value in the words, cashiered in worlds not yet spoken. Until now, fresh-dipped in ancient blood ...

The Offering of the Host

Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.

“No, no -- no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will you give me as much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whales barbs were tempered.

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nom ine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.

-- Moby Dick 532


Exegetical Aside

Melvile wrote to Hawthorne in a letter, “This is the book’s motto (the secret one), ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine’ -- but make the rest out yourself.” “Madness is indefinable” -- and that other half of Ahab’s cry -- ‘sed in nom ine diaboli!’ has its own blood rhetoric: “But in the devil’s name!”

F.O. Matthiessen provides this curious footnote in American Renaissance:

“On the back fly-leaf of the final volume of his Shakespeare, the volume containing Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, Melville jotted down some notes, apparently designed for a story involving a formal compact with the devil, cast in modern terms, since he was to have been met ‘at the Astor.’ He then added:

‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et
Fili et Spiritus Sancti--sed in nomine
Diaoli,--Madness is indefinable--
It & right reason extremes of one,
-- not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic--
seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel.’

“Charles Olsen, in his essay ‘Lear and Moby Dick, takes these to be ‘rough jottings’ for Moby Dick. ‘Right reason,’ in the coleridgean and Emersonian terminology, is the highest range of the intuitive intelligence, the gateway to divine madness ...
Olsen is particularly interesting in the way he brings out the contrast between ‘Goetic’ and ‘Theurgic,’ the traditional terms for black and white magic, for the demonic and sacred arts.” (American Renaissance, Oxford U. Press paperback ed., 1968, 457)

So: madness and right reason are the extremes of the sacred theurgic magic, both roads to God, counterbalances of psyche. When you think you’ve got it down, Oran’s head pops up from the grave to tell you that the way you think it is is not the way at all. Holy madness, perhaps, but this day sanctions it.





Homily


5:15 a.m. -- thick cool darkness outside, rich in the transformative juices of the fall, welling a black blood from the garden’s seams and a old night’s beams ... Perched atop my iMac, staring back at me is my skull coffee mug with a greyblack stone from Iona set it (a dragonish sharp swirl of quartz in the center of it), those black eyeholes portals into Oran’s sight, he who walks and sees and knows the dark. My dark brother, my familiar into this wilderness which I love and border and further with each newly blooded word.

Weave this vibrant dark into this four-day weekend, saturate in the juices which physic my overworked, ever-lovin’ days. On Sunday my wife and I readied this house for the trickertreaters, harrowing that dark by setting up figures that glow in it out in our yard and porch: two candescent figures on either side of our driveway’s egress to the sidewalk -- a big cat poking out of a pumpkin and a witch; small plastic pumpkins set with votive candles on the steps leading up to the house; a jack-o-lantern waving from the kitchen window; a green paper lantern with a witch on it hung from the beams over our front door; the big pumpkin I carved spooky-wild and set on the birdbath in the garden. I also put in tall stakes around the outside perimeter of the garden and strung masking tape between them, forming a barrier of sorts to keep kids from running up to the house through the garden; a spooky enough perimeter to which we’ll add luminaries tonight.

We packed bags of treats, putting in each little Halloween bag some combination of four Snickers, Milky Ways, Raisinettes, Reeses Pieces, candy corn, SweetTarts, Chick-o-Sticks, and these cool black gumballs that ooze blood and turn your tongue pink; then tying up the bag with bright ribbon. Sat there on the floor filling up and tying 120 bags with the TV on playing a ghastly montage of bloodsuckers ‘n’ monsters and knife-slashers and goons and goblins and haunted houses and unnatural birds and blobs marauding in from the farthest nebulae of outer space -- every cable channel dipping deliriously into the popcultural cistern of blood -- and our cat on the floor behind us, betwitched and enthralled with ribbon my wife wrapped around her, making sounds from the “North By Northwest” and “Halloween” soundtracks. Windows wide to a breezy day, the hurtful, roaring world at rest.

And after dark we turned everything on -- including the big witch-surrounding moon the upper window of our house--lit the votives, and stood outside to survey our work. Shine a light in the darkness, but gently, to make the darkness shine! The kids will have fun, fer sure -- there’s not much of this in our town, with all of the absentee owners and seniors and hard-line Christians -- We don’t think we’ll have much candy left by the end of the night. We hugged and went in, talking to Violet where she strained against the screen of one of the front windows, wanting so to be out in the dark with us, or just out in the dark.

I present all this lavishly here, because there is a harder darkness too to the time, my wife facing surgery for sure now (laproscopic removal of her ovaries) and she’s convinced something is going to go wrong, our money getting shorter and shorter in supply, our parents spluttering on in the fading embers of age, Blue and Red mauling the corpse of a squirrel all day, glutting themselves insensate on real blood. And the world, our sad frightening terrible world, so ripe in its cruelty and idiocy, the gluttings of a materialist culture which SuperSizes the infantile impulse, the continued evaporation of literacy, the flight to fundamentalist camps of mass belief -- All of that just sucks, but if you can hold a flickering candle of divine darkness to it, how quickly it all fades from view ....




Gospel(s)

To peruse some of the voices which have rabbled in my skull this weekend from the readings: they tenor and weave, like dark crickets or a surf, the motions of my own. First this, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (Penguin Arkana, 1989)

“The ordinary materialist usually fails to recognize that only spiritual affairs count for anything, even in the grossest concerns of life. The facts of murder are nothing in themselves; they are only adduced in order to prove felonious intent. Material welfare is only important as assisting men toward a consciousness of satisfaction.

“From the nature of things, therefore, life is a sacrament; in other words, all our acts are magical acts. Our spiritual consciousness acts through the will and its instruments upon material objects, in order to produce changes which will result in the establishment of the new conditions of consciousness which we wish. That is the definition of Magick.” (124-5)

***

Loren Eisely, from The Firmament of Time (Athenium Publ., 1962), quoted in Campbell’s Creative Mythology:

“The group ethic as distinct from personal ethic is faceless and obscure. It is whatever its leaders choose it to mean; it destroys the innocent and justifies the act in terms of the future”

Campbell: “But the future, as he then points out ... is not the place to seek realization.”

Eisley: “Progress secularized, progress which pursues only the next innovation, which pulls thought out of the mind and replaces it with idle slogans, is not progress at all. It is a beckoning mirage in a desert over which stagger generations of men. Because man, each individual man among us, possesses his own soul ... and by that light must live or perish, there is no way by which Utopias -- or the Lost Garden itself -- can be brought forward to such a destiny. Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the the Garden” (Campbell, 624)

***

And reading elsewhere in Campbell’s Creative Mythology:


A great portrait is, then, a revelation, through the “empirical,” of the “intelligible” character of a being whose ground is beyond our comprehension. The work is an icon, so to say, of a spirituality true to this earth and to its life, where it is in the creatures of this world that the Delectable Mountains of our Pilgrim’s Progress are discovered, and where the radiance of the City of God is recognized as Man. The arts of Shakespeare and Cervantes are revelations, texts and chapters, in this way, of the actual living mythology of our present developing humanity. And since the object of contemplation here is man -- not man as a species, or as representing some social class, typical situation, passion, or idea (as in the Indian literature and art) -- but as that specific individual which he is, or was, and no other, it would appear that the pantheon, the gods, of this mythology must be its variously realized individuals, not as they may know or not know themselves, but as the canvas of art reveals them: each in himself (as in Shopenhauer’s phrase) “the entire World-as-Will in his own way.” The French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) used to say to the pupils in his studio: L’art fait ressoirtir les grandes lignes de lat nature. James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man writes of “the whatness of a thing” as that “supreme quality of beauty” which is recognized when “you see that it is that thing which is no other thing.” And we have also, again, Shakespeare’s figure of “the mirror.”

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world -- where the application of science to the fields of practical life has not dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again -- each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, “Know thyself,” is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every “thou” on earth is the center of the world, in the sense of that formula just quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as “an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.”

In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called La Queste del Saint Graal, it is told that when the knights of the Round Table set forth, each on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, they departed separately from the castle of King Arthur. “And now each one,” we are told, “went the way upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point and another, there where they saw it to be the thickest” (la ou il la voient plus expesse); so that each, entering of his own volition, leaving behind the known good company and table of Arthur’s towered court, would experience the unknown pathless forest of his own heroic way.

Today the walls and towers of the culture-world that then were in the building are dissolving; and whereas heroes then could set forth of their own will from the known to the unknown, we today, willy-nilly, must enter the forest la ou il la voient plus expesse; and, like it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us.

But of course, on the other hand, for those who can still contrive to live within the fold of a traditional mythology of some kind, protection is still afforded against the dangers of an individual life; and for many the possibility of adhering in this way to established formulas is a birthright they rightly cherish, since it will contribute meanings and nobility to their unadventured lives, from birth to marriage and its duties and, with the gradual failure of powers, a peaceful passage of the last gate. For, as the psalmist sings, “Steadfast love surrounds him who trust in the Lord” (Psalm 32:10); and to those for whom such protection seems a prospect worthy of all sacrifice, an orthodox mythology will afford both the patterns and the sentiments of a lifetime of good repute.

However, by those to whom such living would be not life, but anticipated death, the circumvallating mountains that to others appear to be of stone are recognized as the mist of dream, and precisely between their God and Devil, heaven and hell, white and black, the man of heart walks through. Out beyond those walls, in the uncharted forest night, where the terrible wind of God blows directly on the questing undefended soul, tangled ways may lead to madness. They may also lead, however, as one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages tells, to “all those things that go to make heaven and earth.” (35-37)


Recessional and Benediction


TALES OF THE MAD MONKS

2002


Ireland’s mad monks
of the 7th Century
dipped their quills
in black blood &
wrote down old tales
in wild calligraphy.

What they purported
to be true (or amended
to new faith) was
fantastical and strange,
oral gods and heroes
flattened into
florid scribbles down
the page.

By then it had
been 900
years since the last
man of action dueled
the sea three days:
Since the heroes
lived in voice balloons
over the cooking fire,
a map of mind
framed in a distant song.

The archaeologists
who now dig Irish peat
and walk off radar
soundings at Mag Ruath
and Tara tell us
that we know little
of such stories’ actual
bones: The current
task is to map
a backwards land
old, older, older still,
reconstructing thrones
from bent brooch-pins
and sonograms of
ancient, soft mounds.

Yet for all they
can now describe
of how the royal
sacred stones aligned,
their mouths are
silent round the
ineffable sound
of why
The bones suggest
a frame but not
the bloody heart
which moved
‘em so. A science
must turn to
the dusty graves
of tales, for the
rubbing of arterial
flush, for gleams
in bleak gloamings.

And so a mind
apt for this task
must cobble a
conjectured pair
of fitting enough shoes,
then conjure up
delighted feet
to leap the
the flaming hues.


spleen
2001

God help the, old man,
thy thoughts have created
a creature in thee; and he
whose intense thinking
thus makes him a Prometheus;
a vulture feeds upon that heart
forever; that vulture
the very creature he creates.
-- Melville Moby Dick

Guitar, woman,
bottle, boat-shaped mind:
That of which there
never can be enough
rises and crashes
like a surf in me,
restless, impure,
furious in a spleen
of hot oil. Who but an
Ahab rides the white
whale, plunging each feral
barbs into his
own bottomless heart?

And yet, o rebel will,
bloody in unsounded
agitaition, how is it
that the very life
you mock rounds
here to these sure reins,
this dry surrender?

Harrow the depths
first, last, and well.
Nothing that surges
can without dark swell.
My story’s my name
and this day my father,
hard oaring between dry salvage
and the old, historic slaughter.