A Venusian Soak

I love the Venusian soak; Aphrodite comes from the sea (one of her epithets is Pelagia, "she of the sea"); her influence on thought and deed is like trying to describe the wet part of the sea -- what sufficient name is there for that abundant, changeful, wild, incessant, dangerous, deranging, sempiternally singing One at the shore where I end and the eternal infernal Other begins?

In recent years I've enjoyed much reading and writing about the sea. My reading has taken me from Homer's Odyssey to Melville's Moby Dick (an ur-text for the American gnostic), thence into Joseph Conrad and Francisco Coloane's Cape Horn And Other Stories From the End of The World (dangerous, wild), stories of St. Brendan collected in Sarah Strijbosch's The Seafaring Saint. (My screen name and nom de plume "Brendan" is he who stares out as the mystery behind this mask of a self, a history.) The Oxford Book of Sea Stories is magnificent. Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us stirs the imaginal soup with the rich observations of a naturalist, and David Thomas's The People of the Sea pours in a rich mineral lode of folklore about the selkie or sea-people in Scotland. And then there are the sea-poets, folks with brine in their throats, Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers and, yes, Homer; and poets with venusian ecstasy in their mouths from Mary Oliver's gorgeousness to David St. John's exquisiteness to Susan Olds' explicitness to Jack Gilbert's complicit swash in the most saline realms of the heart.

Such writings confirm the wet part of my experience, one theory has it that the moon tore from the Pacific basin, and in similar fashion it seems that Aphrodite Pandemos hangs out over every writer's work, beckoning from the wave-seeming surfaces of pages and bedsheet. To wit:

WEEKEND AT MELBOURNE BEACH

June 1994

Our first night here was wild.
A full moon tore from the sea
faint and bloody as storms
approached from inland,
lacing the dark with hot bolts.
A sea turtle dragged her burden
of eggs across the sand.
You and I watched from our hotel window,
our bodies trilling with thunder
and salt. I leaned you back on
the table and pulled down your shorts.
Buried my face in your lap.
Sweat and cunt and coconut oil
ripening the sharp ions of beach storm.
You tore wet gasps from
the night, startling the darkness
as much as each lightning bolt
slicing from outside.
Coming again to that third
body that waits for us
beneath the basso billows of surf.
This morning you sleep,
still far off in that sea
of primal soak. The day so
brilliant white, dazed with itself.
I eat a nectarine at the table
and watch maddened dragonflies
hover and hurl in tall dune grass.
Flattened waves break
at the shore in weak curlicues.
The smell of our riot rises
from the table. All we do
these days is surrender.
Swelling for you again,
I return. A blue sheet
ripples over your breasts in a wave.


***

Well, yes. Certainly Aphrodite sexualizes the language, fits flukes on the words like a train of dolphins: Her Pelagian waters are rich, fertile sources of fantasy provide abundant ink for the pen: certainly my wade in Venusian surf is in part a writer's gambit, trope-a-dope to lure the next lucid shimmer from the soup, a gleaming blue pompadour or heavy pubic Aphro tickling the undersides of your attention. Sexualized language is not necessarily genital, only surficially sexually charged: in fact, it's wilder and more fun when the nubbins of sense are just out of sight, hidden by a gossamer of words; when the pressure is applied all around but not diretly, when the funk of desire is amped by the naiad flight of something just out of reach of these words.

Plenitude surrounds Aphrodite like a loosed garment, and danger -- of inflation, of digression, of logorrhea -- is inherent. One of Aphrodite's epithets is Pandemos, "common love," a pandemonium of coitions and cognitions, every permutation right if it somehow slakes or even approximates the slaking of desire, no holds not freighted with frangipani, no holes barred. (An Aphroditean epithet here, "Anadyomene," "she who 'emerges' from the salt sea," suggests that every meme available to thought has a sea-underside incessantly wet and bottomless) One gets easily lost in the polymorphose perverse, the din of its sirens and satyrs furiously coupling in the surf gets in the way of any clear thought. Wow, what was I saying? No discrimination of the spirits here, and monogamy is as welcome as clarity and conviction. It makes for a helter-skelter profusion of posts, first taking one position, switching to another, hammering away in a third and yodeling the high octanes of sweet hell in a fourth. Another day, another song, another dip in waters which are never quite the same.

Venus Pandemos will getcha where you least expect it, and hers is a slippery slope. Reach for those nipples and you're likely to end up milking your own soul's testes of every drop your worth and then you wake up on a bitterly crashing, empty shore, more alone than every, the sound of her laughter folded in the crash and ebb of every wave. It's not a clear road, and we've struggled hard to provide maps and compasses and night-vision goggles, but I don't think the way is any more clear today, not in the present day's media blare of over-bronzed concupiscence.

Having worked the literal consequences of such pandemonium -- years of bad drinking and naiad-chasing, the horrid cost of abuse, spearing venereal diseases along with those curves, endangering two marriages with a rebellious deep-water current of desire which fought with tooth and nail the presence of a ring on my finger of troth -- I've tried to move the altar of Aphrodite offshore.

Hard, almost fatal lessons came first. Necessarily there were jaunts with Ms. Wrong, the one too perilous to yield to and impossible to resist. Perhaps on pain of death I've been forced to move the altar elsewhere, onto a shore more fictive than fact. The imaginal pandemonium has been given a sea, sort of, in my noodle, allowed to vent and froth and dip tootsies in the surf of Aphrodite Pandemos. But pages are dry and wet words are hard to keep in the margins. Like a goddess who will have her way every which way, my fancy is distracted from the pen when She winks from the rounded swells of a remembered passing woman; Her perfume wanders in from the window in the guise of blooming jasmine, disordering and scattering the prim pristine august measures of whatever I was thinking at the time. The shore between verbal ennervation and ham-handed masturbation is thin indeed; always there is the danger of overstepping the bounds, going too ripe, and dropping one's drawers to go fromp up the froth. Floozies bamboozle my prayers with a muse's susurrant excuse.

Acknowledging that is, I believe, casting offerings to the first Venus: goddess of everything forever just offshore, beckoning, sighing, pointing and then curling a finger at me, inviting me to dance and sing and rout and drown. It is by overstepping here that I obey her, and am rewarded (OK, condemned) by Aphrodite Pandemos with a tide of a tongue with deep roots in the slappping bells of drowned heaven.

(And all of this doesn't come close to the everyday eros of Aphrodite Pandemos, the utter profusion of small delights, the smell of jasmine blooming in the window outside, the soft wet sound of cats eating in their bowls, the exquisite curve of my wife's hip as she stirs up from her sleep ... Consciousness seems in some way to narrow the flood of Aphrodite Pandemos through socially acceptable gates, perhaps for the survival of the species: If I truly could savor every thing my senses receive, would I then realize that the Kingdom of Heaven is here? And die?)

Surf's up ... But shut the front door! Else the whole house burble and sink. Besides, this is just one third of Her tale, one aspect of the moon. Coming: the Second Aphrodite Ourania, and then third, She Who Turns Away (With A Callipygean Smile ...)