Big Fish

Carl Jung writes in "The Function of the Unconscious," "The Elgonyi, natives of the Elgon forests, of Central Africa, explained to me that there are two kinds of dreams: the ordinary dream of the little man, and the 'big vision' that only the great man has, e.g., the medicine man or chief. Little dreams are of not account, but if a man has a 'big dream' he summons the whole tribe in order to tell it to everybody."

Myth, I think, is the intrusion of the "big dream" up from the ordinary soup of our lives. It comes from a great depth, it casts a long shadow, it hooks feelings in us that are older than our history. We take an ordinary step on the path of the day and suddenly the forest is thickest and what appeared as path is suddenly salt blue. I read a text with my morning coffee and suddenly my mind is engaged ina strange way, askant from whatever I was thinking the moment before. I am enchanted by the texture and sound of an idea, drawn to its sudden lucence, aroused by its dark curvature. I follow, I dive, I dissemble into the wild unknown, greeted by sirens and sileni and sibylline cries of sudden perfume.

Yet myth is extra-ordinary, so much a part of us that we hardly recognize how old and deep it is. Perhaps it is because we don't realize how old and deep WE are, so attached we are to dailiness. There are big fish in my everyday routines, in my sitting with pen in hand way before first light, in laying next in bed to my wife softly stroking her feet, in commuting to work with the babble rabble, in listlessly hearing the news. How do we recognize these big fish? I think myth codes itself for our encounters with it through trip-wires that leap parts of our brains that our unknown to ourselves. The big lake I drive by every day is gnostic, the steam rising from it in the hoary heave of the sun just up from the horizon spiritous, singing something I know though I've never quite heard it before.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, ""The man is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a big fine fish. So the fisherman threw all the little fish back into the sea and with no hesitation kept the big fish." Attuning to myth is like respecting the dream as necessarily untenable, a draught of waterwilderness poured from somewhere deep within. To know the myths is to learn the mysteries, not that any helpful dayside knowledge may be attained -- for that dries dream faster than a fish out of water --but that we gain a facility for running with the whales, riding the piscene part of ourselves, joining conscious and unconscious in a dance of self which is utterly, uterally wild.

Roberto Calasso writes in "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony," "The mythical gesture is a wave which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them But, as the wave withdraws, the unvanquished complications swell in the undertow, and likewise the muddle and the disorder fro which the next mythical gesture will be
formed. So myth allows no system. Indeed, when it first came into being, system itself was no more than a flap on a god's cloak, a minor bequest of Apollo."

The system -- my rhetoric for speaking thus, is important, but small fish. The anthrophology is fish. The theology, the pharmacology, the sociology, the biology, the ontology are all important yet small fish. But the mythoogy, that's big fish, the big dream, the motion of the ocean whose commotion loins that locomotion of my tongue which is God's. The mythology is the wet part of the sea, the sandy part of the shore between I and Thou, the eternal part of Yes.





BIG FISH

May 11

In my dream I’m back in class
with my first poetry teacher some
thirty years ago. He asked
for samples of our work, clippings
and reviews, as the world’s evidence
that we had put his words to work.
It was a heavy autumn afternoon,
the light in the windows so dark as I
passed my poems forward
that it seemed far under,
a viscous, steely blue North.
A he read my poems I suddenly
cried out, Compression is not
the point! That’s small
fish in a big ocean. And I wondered if
I had offered poems to him at all,
but rather sheets of that outside
swash of eternal hard ardor, sheets
scrawled past their rims with
merciless blue. No, compression is not
the point, I think now as I write
here again, at this same hour of night
with our cat yet again across from
me pent against the screen of an
opened window. And poetry is
even less the point I press, but rather
the fleetest employ of lost angels,
a boat inside the saint’s dim skull
who was buried in the abbey footers
so history could walk forward,
so mystery could sail all the way back
to the first savage coast of origin
so many drowned ages ago.
Each line I write here
hooks something down under,
hauling up bigger and wilder fish
than any have yet to see
or haven’t seen for ages
or will never see except
in the deepest meres of the dream.
The size and strangeness
of these fish aren’t the point
either, but rather a way
to measure the amplitude
of the infernal knowledge
that’s been roused, or
perhaps the aptness of
whatever barb I thrust
this day. Such art
is no different than our
cat’s nose close to the
screen, scenting the text
of night and garden for
hidden pleasures and peril,
limited yet emboldened
by that thinnest shore
of difference (the screen)
which forever moves
the Beloved just beyond,
a sigh in the wave which
crashed here just a second ago.
Not compression, not poetry,
not whatever I think I’m
chasing today, not even
how I chase it; perhaps it’s
only what comes of whiteness
when its writ over
with a black ink’s dirt,
a virgin strand lost
or hidden singing now
unbidden in the dark
from the lucent womb
of an eternally sweet shore,
singing oh so high and
distantly exactly what
I tried to say here yet again
so wrongly, confusing
font for fish. It’s as You wish,
old master, staring at me
in the rectitude of
an old professor who
is by now quite dead.
Although it makes of things
like poems and their caster
a careering blue disaster.