Aphrodite Thalassa (Of The Sea)

The assimilation of unconscious contents, in whatever form, leads not only to an enrichment of the conscious material but to an enrichment of libido, which makes itself felt, subjectively, as an excitement, vivacity, and a joy that sometimes borders on intoxication; and, objectively, as a heightening of interest, a broadened and intensified capacity for work, mental alertness, etc.

In the process of realizing and assimilating an unconscious content, the ego makes a “descent,” from the conscious standpoint, into the depths, in order to raise up the “treasure.” In terms of psychic energy, the pleasure of the “conquering hero” arises from the combination of conscious libido with that of the newly acquired content which is incorporated.

... What was originally experienced only as a vague something “in the depths,” charged with energy and hence very real and fascinating, becomes, as a conceptual content, and item of thought, freely maneuverable by the mind and applicable at will. Such content has certainly gained in utility value, but only at the cost of forfeiting an essential part of its libido charge to consciousness as a whole.

-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness:

***

ON THE SEA

John Keats

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ‘tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved from where it sometime fell,
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
O ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and turned,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea-
O ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody-
Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!


I don’t know why, but it strikes me that the deeper half of our heart is unknowable, eternal, and free, akin to the unconscious and the deep sea: a ruddering vitality that steers me again and again into the same trench between pages, between lines.

This from Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us:

***

Between the sunlit surface waters of the open sea and the hidden hills and valley of the ocean floor lies the least know region of these. These deep, dark waters, with all their mysteries and their unsolved problems, cover a very considerable part of the ocean.

The whole world ocean extends over about three fourth of the surface of the globe. If we subtract the shallow areas of the continental shelves and the scattered banks and shoals, where at least the pale ghost of sunlight moves over the underlying bottom, there still remains about half the earth that is covered by miles deep, lightless water that has been dark since the world began.

***

Oh dark indeedy. Dark as the night side of the moon, as the hidden face of the beloved, dark as the night of our own soul, flapping and splashing in blue mordents. Difficult to accept, perhaps impossible to embrace, not without suffering so many false engagements and deceptions.

All that may just be part of the mysterium of the heart, its oblique salination.

Jack Gilbert here, from “Not the Happiness, But The Consequence of Happiness”:

****

... There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.
It is, he decides, a quality without definition.
How strange to discover that one lives with the heart
as one lives with a wife. Even after many years
nobody know what she is like. The heart has
a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,
is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably
after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late.
Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods
leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.

(from Refusing Heaven, 2005)


***

Dark, yet maternal, infinitely intimate. Sandor Ferenszi here in Thalassa:



Individual observations of the symbolism of dreams and neuroses, reveal a fundamental identification of the mother’s body with the waters of the sea and the sea itself on the one hand, and the other with “Mother Earth,” provider of nourishment. Now such symbolism might be expressive of the fact not only that the individual lives on the mother before birth as a water-inhabiting endoparasite and then for a longer time after birth as an air-breathing ectoparasite, but also that sea and earth were actually the precursers of the mother in the development of the species, and this stage took the place, in that they protected and nourished these animal ancestors, of the maternal protective adaptations which were acquired later.

In this sense the sea symbolism of the mother would approach a more archaic, more primitive character, while the earth symbolism would pattern upon that later period would pattern upon that later period in which the fish, set down on land in consequence of the recession of the ocean, was dependent upon the sources of moisture welling up from within the earth as a substitute for the water of the sea which it had lost (and which had simultaneously brought it its nourishment as well), and in a favorable environment of this kind could lead a parasitically vegetative existence, so to speak, until its metamorphosis into an amphibian was achieved.

***

***

Rachel Carson again, same source:

***

When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal -- each of us carries in our vens a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same poprotions as in salt water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years of ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from teh one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were broughht forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb, and the stages of his embyronic development repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land.




Mothering, symbolically, then is the wet and the deep, sustenance found both in regressive plunging and foraging forward for substitute paps in springs and sap and the welling heart of love.

***

How can the heart be both familiar and strange, knowable and not? Perhaps we grow slowly into into it, over a live, over the lives of the race, descending by choice and discipline and work into a weird rapproachment with otherness and wildness, qualities which a surficial progressive consciousness works hard to eliminate.

Desire takes us there: desire to plunge into the watery body of the other, to suckle and find harbor in the womb, to re-experience the nurture of the womb’s nature, to crawl back into the sea as some animals did in our ancient history -- sea lions and seals, sea turtles and whales.


A GODLY BALEEN

June 18, 2005

This dark night of loving fire, as it purges
in the darkness, so also in the darkness
enkindles the soul.
-- St. John of the Cross

He hat sent fire into my bones, and
hath taught me fire.
-- Lamentations i.13

This dark hour is my altar to
that dark night in which I plunged
too deep in you and died, the way
silver is killed in fire without
mercy so that it may shine
forever with the tooth of brilliant
moons. I’ll not return to those
whiskey-wardened nights of
bone carousal though I
light a candle for them here,
for their inward tooth of
yearn-and-burn, that savage bite
which goes all the way down
into the god of noctal seas.
It’s been hot and hotter of late,
yesterday 95 degrees,
and the seabreeze storms
trooped over selectively and fast,
dumping three inches over the
airport but just a smatter here.
Storms have been merciless
and without mercy elsewhere
all week -- over Seminole
county on Thursday with
lightning strikes burning two
houses to the ground,
and on Wednesday a bad
muthah lingered over the
University of Central Florida
in a two-hour assault, dumping
eight inches of rain and
peppering the land with
lightning strikes so perilous
that the National Weather Service
issued a special warning for all
to stay in. But none of that
massed here, and so an unsated
heat simmers at this 4 a.m.
thick as the sour breath of
that lupine revenant at
the bottle club right now
who will never score another
woman, ever, damned to burn
ever hotter every night
henceforth. Even the crickets
seem scorched into silence,
flattened down by the wake
of a sun which split the sky
a few hours ago. All that fire
here is dark and makes the
the night especially so, cauling
a weight in me of those
years I was the nightly
martyr of my eros, arrow
burning arrow barbing
right through my gut
into every flank of the sea
to curl towards my shore.
It is not the result of those
nights which still matters
but the noctilucent thrall
which sailed me nightly onto
a blackening tide, chasing glimmers
and mermaids in an
orchestrally salty stink.
Don’t get me wrong -- the
tunnies all mattered, their
revealings and succorings pressed
like pornographic leaves in
a book I pray never to burn
for fear its god bid me burn
my life all over again, filling
those pages back up. But after
all those years the undersides
of that night have blossomed,
like a sea garden, at the
deadest hours of the day
when I’m called to black matins,
by long drowned fairy bells --
a lost city of lust which
on nights like this, when
all is so silenced by big heat,
I can hear the faint music
from the few bars still open
and the jackal-like laughter
of the few damned carousers
to sing the last lines of
their vespers, words I
remember well. This was
the hour I finally ran out of fuel,
lack of booze or money or
consciousness dropping the
a heavy black curtain
on that next burning bouree.
Here and now I am what rises
from that drowse,
unslakables harrowed by that
god-decreed souse in which
I lost her but good and ever
& dreamt down and through
burnt chapels at the bottom
of the sea. I came thus to tonsure
my verses in the offices of a
mild infernity -- blue in dolor,
solar red to the lees. I’m on my
knees and praying hard, my
face buried in loins only found
under blackened spires
swathed in godly baleen.
My ink is derricked from
the darkest breasts revealed
at this hour years ago;
I set these saucers of
black milk at the window
for that old totem sea-wolf
that his thirst may thus stay sealed.

***

Well, as Jung wrote, such lunacies are part of traffic in Thalassa. “ Everything the anima touches becomes numinous -- unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical ... She affords the most convincing reasons for not prying into the unconscious, an occupation that would break down our moral inhibitions and unleash forces that had better been left unconscious and undisturbed.(CW 9, i, 59)

***

EARTHLY POWERS

May 7

Energy fools the magician, but
it also fuels him. There is no other
way to harvest earthly powers.
The big sound of rock ‘n’ roll
poured like an ocean through
the 2-inch speaker of my
bedside radio. My thirteen
year-old night burst in that
music’s wild profanity,
my heart inside horse haunches
galloping drumbeats in every
way a boy could yearn for
with a man’s new mess of hair.
It was necessarily a wrong
octane, filling my head with
dreams of stages with their
tidal surges applause &
the ripened nipples of such
welcome. That was the
point of magnitude, I believed,
entering its first-floor domain
in my heart. I had it all
wrong -- power was never
any match for surrender -- but
how else could I have started into
the song that found wilder
rooms a floor or two down,
beating in the heart of a woman
then fanning the night sky with
ancient pale fire, then
measuring itself out between
the margins of silence and
deep water. If hard rock
hadn’t filled my ears those
Florida nights long ago with
the outermost chambers
of wild blue, I would take such deep
pleasure sitting here at 4 a.m. on a
Sunday with summer now refusing
to sleep in the opened windows.
Something outside yet within
is utterly pregnant with all
that those first rock n roll
songs were precipice to, a long
slow fall into the regnant soul.

***

History descends into mystery, partly through the oblivion of forgetfulness; but mystery rises back, glowing from the accumulations of what fell there. Lady Wilde describes the fairy palaces of Lough Neagh:

***

Down deep, under the waters of Lough Neagh, can still be seen, by those who have the gift of fairy vision, the columns and walls of the beautiful palaces once inhabited by the fairy races when they were the gods on earth; and this tradition of a buried town beneath the waves has been prevalent for centuries amongst the people.

Giraldus Cambrensis states that in his time the tops of the towers “built after the fashion of the country” were distinctly visible in calm, clear weather, under the surface of the lake; and still the fairies haunt the ruins of their former splendour, and hold festivals beneath the waters when the full moon is shining, for the boatmen coming home late at night have often heard sweet music rising up from beneath the waves and the sound of laughter, and seen glimmering lights far down under the water, where the ancient fairy palaces are supposed to be.

(F.S. Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland, vol III)


***

Or this, from Keats’ Endymion:

... Far had he roam’d,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam’d
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss’d
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp’d a chin
But those of Saturn’s vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe
These secrets struck into him; and unless
Dian had chased away that heaviness,
He might have died: but now, with cheered feel,
He onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal
About the labyrinth in his soul of love.

**

Fell there with the fall of time; fell there from the suppression of the heart, of a lucency which was too wild for cities raised on firm ground.

It’s how Christianity was able to survive and rise from its sources -- suppression, binding Satan and hurling him and his visceral rabble into the drink. Here’s Eileen Pagels in Beyond Belief: The
Secret Gospel of Thomas

***

Although (the bishop) Athanasius (c 367 AD) intended the “canon of truth,” now enshrined in the Nicene Creed, to safeguard “orthodox” interpretation of Scripture, his experience of Christians who disregarded him showed that these “heretics” could still read the “canonical Scriptures” in ways he considered unorthodox. To prevent such readings, he insists that anyone who reads the Scriptures must do so through dianoia, the capacity to discern the meaning and intention implicity in each text.
Above all, he warns believers to shun epinoia. What others revere as spiritual intuition Athanasius declares is a deceptive, all-too-human capacity to think subjectively, according to one’s preconceptions. Epinoia leads only to error - a view that the “catholic church” endorsed then and holds to this day.


DIANOIA

The church fathers buried this
Heart’s psalter in the footers
Like a dark brother, killing
Off more than half of faith

So walls could stand. They
Copied all the books deemed true
And burned the others. The church
Grew strong as steel, girding with

Certainty a city fit for Rome.
But not every blue gospel
Was destroyed. Buried in
Water caves outside of days,

They slowly drifted down
An oubliette inside us
Chained to other salt profanes.
At the bottom of things you’ll find

A second city of blue steeples
Ringing like bells God’s other people.

***

Of course, that’s the mystery inherent in the tale of St. Oran, which has official and underworld versions.

Here’s the story as it survives in the folklore of the Church:

***


THE STORY OF ORAN AND COLUMBA

Oran may have already been on the Isle of the Druids when Columba and his 12 companions arrived in 563 A.D. to found the Abbey of Iona.

At first, the abbey construction fares badly. Each day’s work is leveled overnight by some disturbed spirit. Columba sets up a watch to observe what happens at night, but each person set to the task is found dead the next day amid the fallen timbers. Columba decides to do the vigil himself and sits alone at the site in the howling cold dark. In the middle of the night, a great and terrible being in the shape of a half-woman, half-fish comes to Columba from the surrounding waters. Columba asks the apparition what is repelling his efforts to build at Iona and the fish-woman says she does not know, but that it would continue to happen until one of his men offered themselves to be buried alive in a grave seven times as deep as a man’s length.
Lots are cast and Oran is chosen (other accounts say he volunteered) and he lay down in the footers and was buried. No wind rises up that night to spoil the work and the construction proceeds without incident.

After three days and nights Columba became curious to know how his follower had fared and ordered him dug up. The monks excavate the spot where Oran had been sacrificed, finally uncovering his face. Oran’s eyes pop open, and staring right at Columba he declares, “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, crying “Uir! Uir! air beul Odhrain” or “Earth, earth on Oran’s mouth!” (The saying “chaidh uir air suil Odhrain” or “Earth went over Oran’s eye” is still widely heard in the Highlands and Hebrides.

Despite the frightful encounter, Columba dedicated the monestary’s graveyard to Oran (Reilig Odhrain) and honored Oran’s sacrifice by saying that no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran. The bones of many Scottish, Irish and Norwegian kings were sent to Oran’s graveyard; Duncan and Macbeth are interred in the St. Oran chapel at the center of the graveyard.



But there’s an underside of that tale, a reading of it from the Underworld prespective, which is saturated with the darkest regions of the heart. This from Fiona Macleod ‘s Iona

ORAN’S VOYAGE TO THE NORTH

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

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

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

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

Long ago one of the monks of Columba [St. Oran] sailed there. He sailed for thrice seven days till he lost the rocks of the north ; and for thrice thirty days, till Iceland in the south was like a small bluebell in a great grey plain; and for thrice three years among bergs. For the first three years the finned things of the sea brought him food; for the second three years he knew the kindness of the creatures of the air; in the last three years angels fed him. He lived among the Sidhe for three hundred years.

When he came back to Iona, he was asked where he had been all that long night since evensong to matins. The monks had sought him everywhere, and at dawn had found him lying in the hollow of the long wave that washes Iona on the north.

He laughed at that, and said he had been on the tops of the billows for nine years and three months and twenty-one days, and for three hundred years had lived among a deathless people. He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every day had known love among flowers and green bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit strange fires, and at the full of the moon had gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, there, under the Lights of the North.

When he was asked how that people might be known, he said that away from there they had a cold, cold hand, a cold, still voice, and cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at the four ends of the green diamond that is the world. That in the north was made of earth; that in the east, of air; that in the south, of fire; that in the west, of water. In the middle of the green diamond that is the world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is in the shape of a heart, and glows like a ruby, though all stones and gems are there. It is there the Sìdhe go to refresh their deathless life.

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

They have not yet come.

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




HIDDEN CATHEDRAL

Space and time ordain the
way our days are measured
out -- manageable drams
of augment walked or ticked
off so precisely as to wall Death
outside the city limits.
Yet how much the heart defines
the way we pass we’ll never
know. Surely more
than the greater half
of oceans, nights and love
are disordered by its
passion for depths, for
heavy-crashing waves.
I sense the tidy boxes
seared around our heads
are fictive, irrelevant.
We walk through a grand cathedral
straining our eyes for God
with the angels hollering
at full choir in the lilt
of pentas at last light,
two yellow butterflies
dancing round a pink
bud as if the other were
blossom enough. And they
are, flooded with a secret
depth of light we’ll never
come to know. That’s the point,
I think, scratching idly
at the end of this poem,
settling back into this
white writing chair like
Hannibal content to
play ditties on his flute
as the Alps slowly approach.

SONG FOR ORAN


Yes, this work reflects your ocean
In pocket fjords of blue -- yet more
Than ghosting mirrors, you sail each
Toward the next, your smile the roller
Which collapses every next shore.
The poems proceed from me to you
To dream our child, his voice not ours
But some fourth choir of one, this dark
Book I slowly fill -- Or rather,
That nook your song coffined sailing
To frozen hell and back. Your tale
I ride down every page, or it
Fins me -- Never to end, nor quite
Say; not to propound or console
But freight the whale from pole to pole.