Sea-birth, He-girth, & Cabbages too

Jan 1, 5:30 a.m.

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 is my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

-- spirit invoked by Faust, I.500-9

***


An absolutely still and hushed dark hour, despite the occasional car lurching homeward up Ninth Avenue: drained to nothing from the prior night’s midnight zenith, so many champagne bottles harrowed to their effervescent depths. We bedded down at an early hour, my wife passing out from PM sinus pills, another of the week’s dastardly headaches (we’ve both suffered ‘em, blaming aerial hammers of high pressure, fronts moving over and receding and hauling back, stalling over us, some days cool, others, like yesterday, wan, sunny, getting into the mid-seventies). Around 9:30 p.m. I lay in bed next to my wife already deeply sleep, our cat settling into the corral between my legs, a window open to random arpeggios of distant firecrackers and bass-thumping car radios, hoots, cackles of celebration around this small town: Nothing in our neighborhood but everywhere on the marge. I figured it would be a long night, there’s a house down the way that gets pretty drunk late at night, and the folks across the street sounded like they were headed out for a good roust (what fun that must have been, to hear the way the couple sniped at each other on their porch yesterday afternoon). It was a vigil I decided to be grateful for, to pray for those descending down the abysms of booze I had fallen twice down the depths of, to keep my memories green with the sounds of that night, safe in a marriage bed I should surely have lost. So I lay there in the dark, half asleep, half listening to that rising party tide, slowly drifting off with the expectation I would be wakened by some carousal or other nearby, dreaming of my sponsee in a heavy fur coat talking to a pretty woman at a department store or my old job at the newspaper, calling me as I passed by to say how wonderfully he’s doing, all of the alarm bells going off in my head ... and then it was 3:30 a.m., wow, already here, and I stumbled downstairs to give Violet her treats and climb back in bed in the guest room as I usually do when I wake too early, (that bed much more comfortable to me), and absorbed the chill dark hush, the absolute entropy of party-cranked merriment into stillness, the old year’s spilled water and exhausted sleep, new year delivered, sleeping soundly at the breast ...

***

“The primal water,” writes Carl Kerenyi in “The Primordial Child in primordial times, “conceived as the womb, the breast of the mother, and the cradle, is a genuinely mythological image, a pictorial unit packed with meaning and brooking no further analysis. It crops up ... with especially clarity in the so-called theological discussion at the Court of the Sassanides ((in Iliad XIV 246, 302)). There it is said of the mother who was pregnant with the child-god, of Hera-Pege-Myria, that she carried in her womb, as in a sea, a ship freighting a thousandfold. ‘She has but onefish’, it is added -- the same that is also called her ship.” (in Kerenyi and Jung, Essays On A Science of Mythology, 46)

I read that passage in the hard silent soak of this newborn year and recalled a tradition that was related by the Puerto Rican boyfriend of my stepdaughter back in the early ‘90s; he said that as a boy they would stay up to midnight on New Year’s eve and then spill a bucket of water down the stairs, beating wildly on pots and pans in celebration. His father was dying of lung cancer, so he and his brother were soon to become orphans (the mother dying of AIDS some years before); and the whole context of that story was from the latter dying years of my first marriage, a time I don’t think much about in my writing, formational though they were, part of the first sobriety, the long hard years of diligent study when I first read the myths and began to write with seriousness, having packed my guitar away for good, exchanging big night music for its greater resonance on the page:

Birth waters breaking, lives passing over and through each other, creation stories amid the Flood, creativity’s womb, delving this freight of words on the next daily shore, jots and jisms of finned fire in a wild nutritive soak, the ship and the fish, Brendan and MacOdrum, both augments and vassals of that womb, that first principle of water, the fluid freedom of the extra-continental, unconsonantal Yes ...


***

The mythologem is exquisitely displayed in this tale of the birth of the child-god from Polynesian lore, retold by Kerenyi:

Maui ... tells of his own birth. Apart from the sea, he had a divine mother who bore him on the seashore, and prematurely that. “I was born at the side of the sea, and was thrown by you” -- so he tells his mother -- “into the foam of the surf, after you had wrapped me in a tuft of your hair, which you cut off for the purpose; then the seaweed formed and fashioned me, as caught in its long tangles the ever heaving surges of the sea rolled me, folded as I was in them from side to side; at length the breezes and squalls which blew from the ocean drifted me onto shore again, and the soft jelly-fish of the long sandy beaches rolled themselves round me to protect me.” HIs divine ancestor, Tama-nui-ki-ti Rangi, unwound the jelly-fishes and perceived a human being -- Maui. (ibid. 48)

***

Interesting here that there is a cataclysm -- the premature or untimely separation from the first womb -- and a carrying to term in the the second, greater term. One things of Dionysos born prematurely from Semele when she was immolated gazing on the face of her husband (well, we are told, she asked for it) and Zeus taking the infant and carrying it to term inside his own thigh.

Mythologems are so powerful that they grip our other, concrete mind as well, becoming what K. called “philosogems”, carrying to term first ideas.Anaximander thus theorized that “fish or fish-like beings were born of warm water and earth. In these beings men were formed. The embryos remained in the earth till puberty. Then the fishlike beings opened. Men and women came out, already capable of sustaining themselves.” (ibid 47)


***

Later natural philosophers would also theorize that of an aqueous birth of the human race -- Kerenyi mentions the 18th century scientist Olan of Jena, who theorized that the first man”must have developed from a uterus much larger than the human one ... the sea.” And I’ve mentioned here Sandor Ferenszi, disciple of Freud whose “Thalassa” clearly links human psychology with the sea, our ocean brains lowest-stem, the memory of the first fish to crawl ashore.

THALASSA

(Jan. 2003)

Travel down the monkey’s ass &
You’ll find a fish’s tail, finned for
Sailing the biggest womb of all.
Beyond foolery, these motions
Are more riven, nigh desperate
To swim and fuck and eat. That’s all.
That road is five hundred million
Years long; and deep, too, sounding some
thirty thousand leagues of salt blue.
The fish’s tail hangs from my own a
Very long ways back and down; that’s
Good comfort as I fan ahead
With my tribe, who think their brains have
Brighter synapses than the sea’s.
May all I fling swim deep in thee.


It’s easy to posit an ocean birth “literologem” as a driving fuse of literary production, perhaps all creative productions, since artistic creation always involves a giving birth or bringing forth, out of from the chaotic plermoma of some fructive sea a child which bears unmistakable traces of its creator and yet is a wholly individual life.

Melville, certainly was harrowed by the seas he had sailed, returning to his ocean again and again to get to Themes that had not adequately been spoken of in his day (nor, perhaps, in our own). He trusted only Sea-roads to adequately tell the truth, and sea-depths to get to his point. “Better to sink in boundless deeps, than to float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye Gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.”

Even where there was no sea did Melville locate it, and thus empower him in a saying that lent his prose an oceanic sort of power. In “John Marr,” a sailor is forced to land as the result of an injury suffered at the hands of pirates, and works his way inland, ending finally at a prairie settlement. Melville asks us or himself what a man does after his great sea voyages, physical or imagined:

***

Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. “It is the bed of a dried-up sea,” said the companionless sailor -- no geologist -- to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanses bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that to alert eyes and ears, emanates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.

But a scene quite at variance with one’s antecedents may yet rove suggestive of them. Hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.

***

And as the imagined sea provides a vehicle for oceanic reveries, so John Marr is thus able to connect with his lost friends, and Melville with his past creations:

***

Though John Marr’s shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of meditation they were like phantoms of the dead. As the growing sense of his environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms, next to those of wife and child, became spiritual companions, losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life. And they were lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns.

... Twined we were, entwined, then riven,
Ever to new embracements driven,
Shifting gulf-weed of the main!
And how if one here shift no more,
Lodged by the flinging surge ashore?

Nor less, as now, in eve’s decline,
Your shadowy fellowship is mine.
Ye float around me, form and feature: --
Tattooings, ear-piercings, love-locks curled;
Barbarians of man’s simpler nature,
Unworldly servers of the world.
Yea, present all, and dear to me,
Though shades, or scouring China’s sea.

***

So ferry on, sweet salt reveries, propounder of the pregnant wave ...



Jan. 2 (Monday), 5:24 a.m.

Warm again this morning, a 60-ish breeze working through the opened windows around this chair, my wife sleeping upstairs on a spit of hot flashes, hating the balmy weather of the day, though for me it’s seemed respite enough -- we Floridians are such wimps -- from days markedly cooler, far from the white fevers of summer. As the day yesterday breezed into the mid-70s, I took down the Christmas tree in the center of the garden, set back the birdbath, and went behind the garage to cut up limbs and branches from the two live oaks at the edge of our property that had been collecting since the summer. Sweating in an afternoon of a certain stillness not halcyon but devoid of harder certainties, with football yahoos a few doors down watching the Miami game by their pool in back & our neighbors across the street painting their house while the guy next door stands by with hands in his overalls pockets talking and talking & my wife inside laboring away on curtains at the farmhouse dining table she’s converted to a measuring station, brow furrowed with care & our longhaired stray Red dozed stretched out in a sunbeam by some bushes ...

... Starting time, mewling in the wan warm weather, a fecund absorption of radiant energies with no reply yet needed, required, compulsed ...

***

As he was writing Moby-Dick Melville’s literary imagination underwent a transformation: The book he started out to write turned into something wholly other, deeper, wilder, madder, richer, blasted. Delbanco in his new biography accounts for a number of reasons:

1) A 3-year stint living in New York City, in which he wrote Mardi, Redburn, White Jacket and the beginnings of Moby-Dick:

Moving clause by clause through Melville’s New York prose is like strolling, or browsing, on a city street; each turn of phrase brings a fresh association; sometimes we are brought up short by a startling image requiring close inspection; sometimes a rush of images flickers by; but there is always the feeling of quickened pulse of some unpredictable excitement, in aftermath or anticipation. (119)

2) Melville’s sense that no one had yet captured the essence of the Theme he wished to write about, a whaling voyage. There were parallels in other arts; he was particularly drawn to the sea-scapes of J.M. Turner, “in which he saw intimations of what he was to call the “howling infinite.” Early in his new book he describes a painting of an indistinct sea scene consisting of ‘“unaccountable masses of shades and shadows” that seemed to him an effort “to delineate chaos” itself. (122) ,,, If Melville found oceanic truth in Turner, he had not encountered anything comparable in words. (123)

How, then, to get words to fully sail in like fashion to the Pequod? There were technical issues; description and narrative were not enough. He wrote to Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast:

Blubber is blubber, you know, tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; -- + to cook the thing, you must needs throw in a little fancy which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.

3. A sudden wild influx of deep waters into his literary imagination from elders living and dead. He struck up a fortuitous friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, reading and then reviewing Mosses at An Old Manse, finds himself desiring to reply in kind. Though for many that book was seen as bed-side reading, Melville quickly sensed a gnostic darkness lucent in its undersides which he, too, wished to welcome and advance. He wrote of Hawthorne,

Spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side -- like the darker half of a physical sphere -- is shrouded in blackness, ten times black ... You may be witched by his sunlight, -- transported by the bright gliding in the skies he builds over you; -- but there is the blackness of the darkness beyond; and even his bright glidings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.

His reading at this time also jumped off the deep end, so to speak, with a backward glance. He read Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aenid, finding a high liquid language for his prose. He read with great interest Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein drawn to the figures of “an errant genius who hunts down the quasi-human monster he has created after it has turned against him and murdered the woman he loves” (Delbanco 129).

And then there was Shakespeare. Melville’s reading of the Bard had been slight (he complained that all the editions he had previously encountered had such small type he could barely read the text), and he wasn’t much impressed by contemporary stagings of his plays. But then he came across a readable edition and found himself immersed, engrossed, enrapt with the courses of a literary mind which took him as a reader, diving deeply in exactly the manner he inteded to write. Shakespeare, Melville exclaimed,

insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character to utter, or even hint of them.

5. And finally, Melville got the balls to go for the big one. Empowered to say and speak because Shakespeare had dared to, Melville embraced an indefinable madness (the “secret motto” of Moby-Dick) which provided the literary device for harrowing the Lascauxian depths of the tragic hero he named Ahab. With such a commander at the helm, Melville too found voice for the uterine sea itself, and speak as both ship and fish, captain and prey, gnostic zealot and embracing abyss. With this voice Melville could locate the white whale, a creature which the critic Richard Slotkin has said is “at once masculine and feminine, a phallus and an odalique, enticing and overwhelmingly erotic” -- “a creature both exquisite and appalling,” Delbanco writes, “in which the whole originating force of creation seems concentrated” (139) Or, to lower a whale-boat with our Creator Melville holding the harpoon,

A gentle joyousness -- a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested in the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

But the real miracle of Moby-Dick, what maskes it for me a gnostic gospel essential for our time, is that that Melville managed to house that far enraged mad sea tragedy right inside the life of every reader, so that my reading-chair becomes the highest stoop on the Pequod’s main-mast.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

So though my morning be dry and calm and saturated with suburban satieties, the grand wild dark is crashing yet against these windows; and jaws are rising up from below like an angel’s claw to rip me from sweet vantage, to haul me, screaming and twisting, down three miles of bubbly abysm into eternal freezing dark. Finis. To know that is sheer madness -- sheer truth. The howl of Shakespeare and Melville is to dive willingly into the aphotic keep, to harrow that dark heart, returning here a bucket of blackened blue -- spermacetti of the archangel Michael before he lifted from Manannan, the tolling of Davy Jones’s cold ball bells, the angelus of the eternal sea folding and crashing at this paper shore I walk every day.




Tuesday, Jan. 3, 4:45 a.m.

Breezes hauling something harder on yet-distant wings, flutters of rain, fluting angel’s sighs in the boughs -- 50 miles north of here a front raged across the peninusla but here it’s still, adamantly, warm, calm, even buoyant. We’ve a few more days of this before a promised freeze. Last night we slept with the a/c on, my wife’s hot flashes reacting noxiously to the unseasonable weather; but we keep the comforter nearby. Stasis is not a durable good in this charged season.

***

OK: Dark water, blue abysm, Davy Jones’s ballsy bells in hell, paper shore, wild peramble, crash and fold and ebb, etc, etc etc. ad infinitum et nausuem: my Tropes of Soaking Blue are all rusty by now, shopworn, their rope-ends frayed and embedded with so many scales and teeth and shreds of blubber.

So what r ye getting at, matie? What’s the point of this incessant daily lowering to engage and lance the same old same old Leviathan who tolls yer every church-bell? Is this bliss, or compulsion’s too-resonant wave-ebbing hiss? And is gnosticism enough? At what expense this daily vowel movement of blue mordents? I harrow the same old hallows; endlessly launch the vowels; aim for the same spot behind the flukes, full knowing what is far bigger and wilder and stronger than I will ever delve proper adverbs for.

Is the disconnect too great with the day, has that been permanently sundered? I make peace with paper seas and gods and Beloveds, freeing actual days to crunch and lurch and wheel on as they do and must, freed from any attempt here to rudder or mast them with infinite blues. But that keeps me from saying much about the world George Bush and his neocon holy jackboots have seized control of; about the earth that warms and the AIDs that swarms and the neon lustre that disarms the rabble of its outrage, lining ruin with the smarmy pink bosomage of cultural arrears.


Do my sources too strip-mine the world of its final vestiges of daily sooth? Poems are literalogems; like philosgems and mythologems, are primal: they plunge to sources; they hearken seaward in a cochineal sense, they plunge in and down sexually into an infinte infancy of boundless bliss; there is a dark madness in their verbal travails, a sense which dives or dowses, trusting darker regions to delve greater truths; it is both a backwards glance and personal nekyia, submitting to the howling gale beneath this chair that these words be harrowed in their greatest augment, which is, I suppose, as close to scripture as one gets to write.

But such ocean motions are as fixed as the gravitas of birth: every word poured here fell from that first womb, and is fated to course back towards it. It’s not clear whether a literature today can delve as deep as Melville’s whale, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet sails his soliloquies beyond the grave, as the pilot Palinurus in Book V of Virgil’s Aenid, under a spell from the god of sleep, plunges into the ocean and drowns; not clear at all; there may be limits to the depths our language can harrow, and they may all have been reached.

If so, then why bother? If each new age or generation subsists on shallower articulations, more suburban rages (grand mal conflagrations ebbing to petit mal pouts), with every visual access granted but fewer words for what is thus revealed, what the hell am I saying that I should be saying? Are adequate maps enough? Providing sufficient witness to a drone?

Or is the job of the writer (OK, this writer) to continue clearing acreage and lifting stones, planting and harvesting these crops of wave-like words, careering in a world beneath careers, in worlds beneath The World? Do I carry on my father’s work, who left New York City in ‘75 to build chapel in the woods, finding an alphabet in standing stone to write an older deeper truer name of the Christian God of fallen cities?

Is my job to keep on keepin’ on providing that low bass note for the culture, so low that most can’t hear it anymore?

***

I dreamt last night of rehearsing with a church choir the way I used to when I was a teeneager, 30 years ago, back in the 70s world of Nixon and Vietnam, of terrorism in Munich and Alice Cooper and “All in the Family” on TV: I was singing with this unaccustomed, rusty voice, trying to remember the old songs though I was such a bad fit fo them anymore, just wearing shorts -- no shoes no shirt, how could I attend church? But when practice ended and the group began to make its way toward church, I grabbed someone’s guitar case thinking it was still mine, and then lost my way linking up with a group that was headed for the church. Ending up instead in a basement of a large middle-class home (the owners had a huge car or van seating 20 which I barely did not fit into, with all the others headed for church) -- overstuffed chairs, trophies, all sorts of family overstock stored in this dark place -- And while the others headed for church I instead tried to find my own way home by walking through a forest next to the city, trying to scrape the dirt of history away from a flagstone, trying to remember my teens, my old high faith, its certainty, the archangelic tempests of that adolescence which were then still pure and new and absolute ...



HYMN TO PRIAPUS

Jan. 3. 2006

Statues of Priapus, ithyphallic
son of Aphrodite and Dionysos,
were set in Roman gardens
to promote fertility while
warding off thieves and pilferers.

He walks behind me, laughing low,
gloating, dragging his huge phallus
like a swollen tail or Cupid’s rudder,
just finished or readying I can’t tell,
humming a bawdy tune from
the lowest dive in high heaven,
& uttering, at ear’s length, a curse
that my urges steal in kind from me:

rumpatur, precor, usque mentulaque
nequiquam sibi pulset umbilicum

Good lord! Is what possessed me
to creep back into Eden and steal
those cabbages by moonlight
what now possesses me to cross
all borders in pursuit of pussies
and mouths and asses, each a
noose for shame that He ganders
with ditch-gutterals then gooses?
He laughs somewhere behind me,
or under, the rudest deity of all,
still regnant and potent in fascinosum
and pure thrall, parting the sheaves
and branches with proud mentule
at oak-limb’s length, knocking against
my head this cudgel of verses ruddied
from his rout. Surrender is the only
escape from Him but submit here
only if you dare; delight in slackened
angel’s wings if you purpose
slickened pubes, the wave-crest
of thrust in Eve’s own soak,
the salt plumage of ball-deep hairs
absconded from all your heirs.
For steal you thus, thy fruit is His.