Secret Language

In the course of his initiation the future shaman has to learn the secret language that he will use during his seances to communicate with the spirits and animal spirits. He learns this secret language either from a teacher or by his own efforts, that is, directly from the “spirits”; both methods coexist among the Eskimo, for example.

The existence of a specific secret language has been veified among the Lapps, the Ostyak, the Chukchee, the Yakut, and the Tungus. During his trance the Tungus shaman is believed to understand the language of all nautre. The secret shamanic language is highly elaborated among the Eskomos and used as a means of coomunication between the angakut and their spirits. Each shaman has his particular song, which he intones to invoke the spirits ...

This phenomenon is not exclusively North Asian and Arctic; it occurs almost everywhere.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 96

SECRET LANGUAGE

Jan. 29, 2006

It’s taken years to learn the
secret words of blue,
decades, who knows: my
life in this salt scriptorium
upon my writing chair
may just be latest attempt
by oral veins to route
that sound full back on the tongue.
Perhaps the work is slow
because teachers are these
days so few, the old brute
waters so fished out, too
many darks now known,
the corpus callosum which
verbs the milk of sapience
from beloved distant breasts
tattered, rent by to much
light, perhaps, or too few pyres.
Who knows. Every age bears
a cross inside its new
articulations, its own
perplexities to addle
the augments of blue.
My familiars morphed
from the usual suspects
-- my mother’s voice next
to the sea; my father’s
words in rooms of stone--
girls too who said my name
like butterflies on a summer
day, so gossamer I could not
hold them in my arms, much
less say their names or write
them on the page. --Oh and
brutaller instructors too,
that bad sound of baleen-sieving
nights when I inhaled
too much musk and
whiskey in the smoke of
of lousy bars, nosing
my way to that brassy clang
which peals all shores
ululate and undulate
and undying for one night.
All those delights and
dolors ranged my timbre’s
hues: But just how to say
or sing full back the
bull-freight of blue? I
read, I wrote, I read wrote
more, over and over, day
after day for years, each
mornings’s embarcature
like the jaywalker who
loves wild crossings more
than getting safe across or
the barrel-diver who gets
a rise from fatal falls.
This morning’s poem is
my latest exempla
of servitude to words
which woof and wrangle
and perturb the petticoats
of a nakedness I’ll never
find words true enough for --
I mean true wilderness,
where names in their
ferallest pelts cavort and
plunge in sylvan thunder.
I always think I’m getting close
but each time I end up here
trying to wrap lacunas up
with something blue enough,
an azurish button of a couplet
or a pale sheet of metaphorcials
fluttering down on stated lovers
in the lysis of pure descent,
the picture fading full
to black just as the curvatures
die fully draped. But I can’t
end this thing, not yet, I
haven’t learned the ends of
that secret tongue. Or perhaps
that language knows no closure.
Perhaps the tongue of sea-
faring angels was meant for
endless tides of days and
hangs forever here, on
the same wave that I
started from when I
looked up at my mother
standing over me and sang
the sea right back. The
secret song is thus all the
ones a heart pours out
in gratitude for seas.
That works for me today
as I walk back from one shore
and begin to walk upon
next, hearing my wife sigh
and stir. I shut this book
to head upstairs and
lay next to her in pink
first light, and there run my
fingers across her soles just
so, again and again so soft
and slow, singing first
and last what only tongues
of angels know.



Over the long span of geoligic time, the ocean waters have come in over North America many times and have again retreated into their basins. For the boundary between sea and land is the most fleeting and transitory feature of the earth, and the sea is forever repeating its encroachments upon the continents. It rises and falls like a great tide, sometimes engulfing half a continent with its flood, reluctant in its ebb, moving in a rhythm mysterious and infinitely deliberate.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us


***

The great sea
Has set me adrift.
It moves me as the weed in a great river,
Earth and the great weather move me,
Have carried me away,
And move my inward parts with joy.

— Eskimo woman shaman, quoted by Rasmussen

***

How great it is to write the single line:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!

- From "John Horace Burleson,"
by Edgar Lee Masters,
Spoon River Anthology

_____


THE SIREN’S TONGUE

2005

She sings on a black
rock just beyond the
tide, her voice inside
each treacherously-
breaking wave to
wash all shores salt blue.
What language ferries
deep that music here,
crossing ages, seas
and lifelong loves,
untranslatable and
unfathomable, undinal
in the crash and foam
which draws and
then denies me? It names
a girl, almost, her
breasts revealed
above the wave, her
throat pure white
and necklaced with
sea-foam, her cold
blue eyes reckless
and wild and set on
me in a way that
sees and psalms
progeniture beyond
all words I have
yet sired. Gaelic in its
lilt and plush yet
older as the stars
that sing the moon
up from the sea
to tide above yet
deeper in the waters
I really mean to say
but can’t, not yet.
Her song was wakened
in me in one shoreless
kiss a thousand years
ago: Since then
I’ve been rowing hard
to every known shore
and many more not
found on any map,
the long lost music
still ringing in my
ear like waves inside
a shell, or dreams
which drift ashore
all day in tatters of
the purest silk. Ah how
could words be loving
yet so cruel, the merry
foaming wave an oubliette
to so many rooms below,
each winnowed with abyss?
Malefic? Maddened?
Welled from the
worst booze? Yes--
But the song she pours
into this breaking scree
is the from sea half of
my heart’s decree, a child
both of water and its God.
A strange chanson that’s
altared best on these narrow
shores I walk and
write, on pages white
as her pale throat
out beyond the morning’s
dross of hotel coffee
& hours of selling
soap downstairs. Psalter
me, o love, just where
your tides siren the air.
Wash me with your next blue mare.



Like the priest, the artist is a master of metaphorical language. The priest, however, is vocationally committed to a vocabulary already coined, of which he is the representative. He is a performing artist executing scripts already perfectly wrought, and his art is in the execution. Creative artists, in contrast, are creative only insofar as they are innovative.

-- Joseph Campbell, "The Way of Art,"
in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

____

... (Mananan) will delight the company of every fairy-knoll,
He will be the darling of every goodly land,
He will make known secrets - a course of wisdom -
In the world, without being feared.
He will be in the shape of every beast,
Both on the azure sea and on land,
He will be a dragon before hosts at the onset,
He will be a wolf of every great forest.
He will be a stag with horns of silver,
In the land where chariots are driven,
He will be a speckled salmon in a full pool,
He will be a seal, he will be a fair-white swan.
-- "The Voyage of Bran," 52-54


***

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

2002


I first heard people speaking in tongues
at the Pentecostal church my mom
dragged us to when she was shopping
for a holiness great as her grief.
I was 13 years old and zipping down
everything those parishioners
tried to lace in high glottals.

After the sermon (smoky, taut)
someone behind us began talking
in words that were not:
a wave of clicks and ululates
strange but apt, in tune
with the fervency of belief,
an devout apassionata, though
cheesy with angels, almost stout.

Then an old lady next to my sister
started up in a different tongue,
faux-Arabic blent with trailer South.
One by one the congregation picked up
the tirade, and within minutes everyone
was going at it, a wild flapping goose
hitching a ride to high heaven.

I peeked over at my older
brother and like me he was torn
between fright and giggle. Something
in it was both silly and true, the
way TV rasslers took evil to the count
wearing powder blue tights.

My mother clenched her eyes
down hard and commenced her
own tongues, a pissing release
from her careful modulations
that somehow let her broken
heart go safe at last & saying
the right words to God. He seemed
to whisper the words back through
the faithful’s fountain of mouths.

I gave it a try. You had to pretend
you were dreaming. That it was OK
to fly. You stepped out on the tongues,
believing that wherever you babbled
turned holy. It always stood on a
buttery slope where you could equally
cry as break into a laugh. You could
only believe, as clouds carve ice
mansion in the sky.

To this day when I lower pen to paper
I pause, and remember that flow, sure to get
down what I don’t know. That’s how it works.
You really don’t.And like those people
talking in tongues, I may speak in
the language of angels—or simply join
in the congregation’s wholesome fraud.
The effort is silly. It flies.



FRENCH KISS

2003

Sometimes the ink
is pure glossolalia,
the skull-babble
of a dozen tongues
all crashing in the surf
I send to God.
Heart-prayers have
a voice which words
as they are used
all fail, and so it
skips the sounds,
like a stone, over
the waves, freed
of root in sense or
meanings my dry
usages ascribe.
The heart wells
up a torrent which,
unblocked by
dayside will, rises
a wild fountain
which drowns the
world in Yes.
Joyce released his
pen that way in
Finnigans Wake,
a "scherzarade
of one's thousand
one nightinesses"
-- a 17-year effort
to plumb the words
of dream. Its
prose is incoherent,
a fabulous babble
which washes
every page with
thunder. It
"truck his spickle
through his
spoke, disappeared
... from the sourface
of the earth, that
austral plain he
had transmarried
himself to, so
entirely spoorlessly
... as to tickle
the speculative to
all but opine ... that
the hobo ... had
transtuled his funster's
latitat into its
finsterest interrimost."
Yeah whatever he
he said, or spouted.
Surely such joys
have a riverish
gush, spring
boldened, lusty in
the crash of early
love's fool errands,
believing no thighs
unparted, no height
not swimmable --
I recall spring '82
when some woman
took me on the wings
of rock n roll
fantasy, asking for
a ride home from
the club and then
commanding me pull
over, tearing free
our clothes & then
fucking me in that
cramped Datsun
as savage as some
Scylla, hauling up
a torrent which lathered,
soaked, crashed,
spurned and then
nearly drowned us both
for a month or so.
One Saturday morning
I woke in that
bed I called (provisionally)
my own, with gum
in my pubic hair (she
parked it there) and
my words suddenly
unhinged, "rollicking,"
"verb-mated with lust,"
as if a thousand nunlike
nouns had all been
fucked silly and were
now sprinting with
merry devils on the lawn,
mewling and shrieking
Hell Yes. Certainly
sex as I desire
lubricates the jaw,
loosening a wavelike
torrent meant (I
think today) to circle
Her sweet ankles
and free all her bows
to the undertow
I'll never row.
Then (I also think
today) that sex goes
underground, freed
from mortal hips, so
to speak, to chase
Eurydices within and
the snakes she
augurs there. The
Pythoness was
maddened by Delphic
gasses rising from
the cracked floor,
her words vomiting
in a flow no man
could quite understand,
a chum of vowels
reddening the holy
blue, rousing appetites
which fin and maw
and chomp and chew
-- blah blah blah,
I usually think
about this time,
conscious how I've
gone on and on.
No poem's done, just
emptied of its
heart -- all
verbiage leashed, the
white shore bright
again, naked of Her
though I'm sure
she still calls me there,
standing in a shimmer
of my summer heat,
a curve of tongue
and home, her eyes
blue as my wife's,
our cat's, the dawning
day's -- a pale serene,
all the wings of
heaven once more
bathed & swathed
in aquamarine.




... think again of your own backward back ward, nursing and sitting with it, dwelling upon it, tracing the invisible mystery in it, letting compassion come for your own chronic disorder -- this all slows down your progress, moves you from future thinking to essential thinking about our nature and character, upon life’s meaning and death’s, upon love and its failure, upon what is truly important, and upon the small things in words, manners, act, necessitated by the limitations of your inescapable disorder. We begin to hear differently, watch differently, absorb more sensitively. Confronted with the unbearable in my own nature, I show more trepidation -- which is after all the first piece of compassion. In regard to others my manners alter, my language more attuned and precise. I become more sophisticated and artful -- as a cat steps, a bird perceives, a dog follows invisibles in the air. I look to arts for understanding, to ritual for enactments, and to the lives of men and women of the past and how they come through. I need something further than community and civilization, for they may be too human, too visible. I need imaginal help from tales and images, idols and altars, and the creatures of nature, to help me carry what is so hard to carry personally and alone. Education of sensitivity begins in the back ward, culture in chronic disorder.

-- James Hillman, "Cultural Disorder,"



***

LANGUAGE

2002


can almost mean
and frightening that it does not quite.
— Jack Gilbert

Yesterday the market fell
390 points. The economy
is recovering but the market
hasn’t accepted that yet
the official wisdom went,
though quietly we now accept
that the emotional ebullience
of investors can swing
both ways and hard.

Log that first.

And it was hot as the dickens
yesterday afternoon, huge hands
pressed down from the sky
to smash us flat and then
tore the air from our lungs.
After five days of this the pressure
dome had erased every feature
of the sky: so when it rained later,
hot drops issued from
a bleary wash above.

That’s two.

Finally when I got home
from work my wife was
assembling a puzzle
trying not to think about
needing a job and dreading
the thought of teaching
hormonally deranged middle
school kids. I kissed her
head but she didn’t say
anything back.

What keeps all
this reportage from
journalling or journalism
is that each facet of
the actual day is a verse
for this book of
lamentation, education,
and repair, the Real Magoo,
not just self-obsessed
and revenantly lyric poo ‘n’ goo.
I write these lines because,
as Williams says, men die
each day for lack of
the right words to say.
Surely I go that way
though screaming all the way.
Of course vanity and
habit are equal spurs.
But the cynic only has
one end and I won’t go there,
girlfriend: The world is
always difficult, but then
it always also disappears
into this hour, this dawn.
I’m like a cat in the window
soaking it up, mewling
at the birds, doing
what comes naturally
in the making of the lines
between the actual’s
too-sharp, almost vicious
tines. Hot again
today -- yardwork to do—
& I must review the
check ledger balance
to make sure
we can pay the bills.
Later we drive down to
my sister’s to celebrate
my mother’s
75th birthday with
relatives I hardly know
any more. Perhaps if the
job fair didn’t go too
corrosively on her mood,
my wife will joins us too,
the first anyone in
my family has seen her
in two years. I don’t praise
the living by signing it,
nor sing of loving
but by living it,
day by difficult
by absolutely perfect day.
What words can I
possibly lay down here
to adaquately express how
wonder gets mired in
the sweatshops of the every day?


***


The Irish received literacy in their own way, as something to play with. The only alphabet they'd ever known was prehistoric Ogham, a cumbersome set of lines based on the Roman alphabet, which they incised laboriously into the corners of standing stones to turn them into memorials. These runelike inscriptions, which continued to appear in the early years of the Christian period, hardly suggested what would happen next, for within a generation the Irish had mastered Latin and even Greek and, as best they could, were picking up some Hebrew. As we have seen already, they devised Irish grammars, and copied out the whole of their native oral literature. All this was fairly straightforward, too straightforward once they'd got the hang of it. They began to make up languages. The members of a far-flung secret society, formed as early as the late fifth century (barely a generation after the Irish had become literate), could write to one another in impenetrably erudite, neverbefore-spoken patterns of Latin, called Hisperica Famina, not unlike the dream-language of "Finnegans Wake" or even the languages J. R. R. Tolkien would one day make up for his hobbits and elves.
Nothing brought out Irish playfulness more than the copying of the books themselves, a task no reader of the ancient world could entirely neglect. At the outset there were in Ireland no scriptoria to speak of, just individual hermits and monks, each in his little beehive cell or sitting outside in fine weather, copying a needed text from a borrowed book, old book on one knee, fresh sheepskin pages on the other. Even at their grandest, these were simple, out-of-doors people. (As late as the ninth century an Irish annotator describes himself as writing under a greenwood tree while listening to a clearvoiced cuckoo hopping from bush to bush.) But they found the shapes of letters magical. Why, they asked themselves, did a B look the way it did? Could it look some other way? Was there an essential B-ness? The result of such why-is-the-skyblue questions was a new kind of book, the Irish codex; and one after another, Ireland began to produce the most spectacular, magical books the world had ever seen.

-- Thomas Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization



SCRIPTORIUM

2002


The scriptorium of the Sixth Century
was a cold, dark and brute room
where copyists inked their ecstasies
amid the bitterest rigors—reeking
sheepskin, claw-hand so carefully
moving across the page, each line
a curragh voyage from I to Thou.
Each copy of a book exacted a
raw chunk of someone’s life.
Nothing’s changed though
conditions have much improved:
I sit in an easy chair in the soft
augers of the early day, bright lamp
over one shoulder, cup of coffee
to my left; but it’s still pen in
hand and the next blank line
in this journal, embellishing
a text whispered in my ear
by one of those dirty angels
gone to dust long ago
when from so little came
ineffably more: voices like
a soundboard rising
from an invisible floor,
from a distant, gnashing shore.
The huts of the copyists
were built that way,
according to the lines of
the more ancient Poet’s House,
rooms of total darkness
where the master inscribed
all history in the
ears of his craftsmen,
line by patient line,
tale by tale,
life after life.
This hand is freighted
by a thousand older hands,
this ink an hourglass measure
of far immenser sands.

***


BLUE BOOK

2005

Each day I write a poem to
press in Your blue book,
my salt scrivener, so that
angel brogue of wildest seas
may once again be
heard inside pale days.
That’s all. In my dream I
found glass cabinet in a lost
corridor of a pressroom,
the metal frame long oxidized
by salt & the glass almost
blurred from all the years of
ink hurled from this pen.
Inside I saw upon a shelf
three shapes of glass, chalices
or hurricane lamps or glass
reliquaries like miniature
cathedrals. All of it is
worth saving here, each
a host, a wave, a belfry.
Yesterday started with every
engine of spring at full pour
with warm sun and breezes
suggesting something more
as I planted salvia and pentas
and kalanchoe in the garden,
my hands happiest to sing
in dirt without the pen.
The front came through
quickly and by one p.m.
I was hurrying in the last
plants in full rain with
thunder cracking overhead.
My wife cursing in the back
yard, all her painting
projects spoiled. Later
that afternoon I was
in my study typing in the
day’s poem when my wife
walked up behind to mock
what I’d just said; I turned
and grabbed her as she
giggled and fought to get
away & I buried my face
in her breasts biting on
a hardened nipple which
surpised us both. Some
Godawful Christian concert
somewhere in town, a singer’s
operatic steeple yowling
“How Great Thou Art”
so loud I could barely
feed the cats on the
back porch. My wife went
to bed early, zonked
on a PM sinus pill &
me joining her not long
after to our bedroom
blue with hard moonlight,
our Siamese curled into
my wife’s behind & purring
loudly as I petted her
and my wife, listening
to the sounds of Saturday
night near and far, voices
from a neighbor’s house
talking about something
indistinct and further
out some party music
weaving in faint roars
of cars and cycles
seeped in testosterone.
All of it liquifying &
draining down into
those glass vessels I
praise here in the last
lines of this poem
which is Yours to publish
in Your book or feed it
to the fish in abysses
far below or feather that
angel’s wing that will
fly when I am done.




The Latin word textus comes from the verb meaning, "to weave," and it is in the institutionalizing of a story through memoria that textualizing occurs. Literacy works become institutions as they weave a community together by providing it with shared experiences and a certain kind of language, the language of stories that can be experienced over and over through time as the occasion suggests. Their meaning is thought to be implicit, hidden, polysemous and complex, requiring continuous interpretation and adaptation.

-- Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory


***

SHOP TALK

2001

No students came through
the Writing Center last night,
so Lolly and I talked long
about the struggles between
creation and relation
and the bruised and bloody
border we inhabit between
those worthy realms of heart.
Difficult indeed to lay
claim to some work
that is our own (free enough
of ego and a puerile need
to master) and show much
measure of it in the daily
round. —Small results year
after year and always a call
in the woods to go naked and
alone into that blueblack fire.
There is much to love: kids,
cats, spouses, houses, the
flora a fabric of need and growth.
It is a rhythm we each said
we could give ourselves wholly to
were it not for this damned
water music within which
we cannot ignore: And so
the balancing act of
giving due to doing both,
accommodations and compromise
in every waking hour. Two horses
test the limits of our
patience and surrender.
Election of the life and the work:
resident of duple worlds,
our citizenship in each is
always muddy with ache
and frustration. We say
that the imperfect is our paradise,
a vale of soul-making
from which angels and
wolverines choir their
random antiphons.
So be it. Came the eventual
hour to say goodnight,
and so on our own
ways we sped, back to
varied homesteads of
the heart in the
territory between
settlement and wild,
back to the dear work
which counts so little
in the end and makes
all the difference in the world.


SHOP TALK (2)

2001

This pen and paper dance
is only that -- balletic
transcriptions of heart
and brain, an interface
both tangible and torn.
This pen obeys the hand
which makes words out
of a water which currents
toward one compass point
one day. Who knows what
that next poem will be about:
I rarely do, until the writing’s
done. Nor do most poems
master their themes:
Two hundred fifty
starts this year but
only a dozen or so
have been worked into
the middles which intimate
some more articulate end.
Perhaps I’ve only learned
to light a fire, and must
turn my efforts to tendering.
To learning how to winnow
out all the faults of
syntax and rhyme; carpenter
strong joints and masts;
revise the heart into
what it meant to say the most.
And beyond all that, there’s the
getting poems to the most
eyes and ears — Well, it’s
obvious now how much more
work there is to do. Foundations
count as far as they go, but
no more: These articulate
scribblings pawn across the board
in liege to a greater fortune
than I’ve yet to name.
Some day I’ll seize the heart
of the heat of the seize
of the soil of the soul.
Today it’s only writing
and weeding, watching the
day’s wavelets roll on,
surmising the wonder
just once before it’s gone.