Lowlandgauge

Psychoanalysis has been eclipsed to a great extent by less expensive and less time-consuming ego-based therapies, and by the even shorter cut of psychopharmacology. But as (Annie Rogers’) "The Unsayable" demonstrates, analysis is as uniquely rewarding as it is demanding. Given discipline, patience - and a measure of courage - it may be the only means of reaching certain patients. To learn that "the unconscious is structured like a language" is to see this aspect of the self as radically different from the way it is popularly misrepresented, as a murky soup of dream fragments and primitive urges from which it's possible to fish out the occasional insight, a kind of primordial chaos from which higher consciousness distinguishes itself.

For Freud, Lacan and Rogers, the unconscious is as complex and sophisticated in its organization as is the conscious, and as individual: each psyche requires its own lexicon. Within this mysterious realm that the Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan called a "savage and beautiful country," Lacan's voice does hold the power of an archangel's, and Rogers's ability to listen and perceive has an equally rare authority. It isn't everyone who can hear what we don't allow ourselves to say.

-- Review of Annie Rogers’ The Unsayable by Kathryn Harrison, NY Times Book Review, August 13, 2006

***

LOWLANDGAUGE

August 22

Only someone with wounded
light or wounded by it would
dare delve in your unquiet ink:
My birth star crossed me with
a talent not fruitable in the world,
a brainy dumbass whose
moment to shine was always
stumblefooted not by others
but from below, by some shadowy
second person within -- silent
partner, Oran’s skull, motley
fool who hauls my balls &
decks my halls with fouls
and follies: Like that spelling
bee in the third or fourth grade
where my teammates highfived
each other gleeful over getting
the smartypants & I went
down in the second or third
round over a word I was
too confident I knew: I thought
it was a breeze and was stunned
when the teacher shook her
head & walked back in shaming
flames to the black derision
of my peers: My days were surely
perhaps virally but most surly
wounded by blights of woeful
circumstance, not only by fists
pounding on my door but
mauled from behind it by my
own funk & far more essentially
getting tripped up from below:
I was not permitted by my
familiar to succeed on luck
and talent: The geis of sex
churned black fins in the
wake of glittery dreams of love:
I was terrified of junior high
because it meant showering
after gym with the black boys:
Once or twice of their wet
horsecock glee at my tiny wee
wee wee & I developed every
manner of osteopathic wounds,
stretching the doctor’s excuse
to last the entire school year:
I had no success with women
in my long adolescence unless
flooded balls to gills with
marauding booze, but I was
a worse lover when I scored,
my pokey dorky half-rect
soldier shooting helterskelter
in the fray if at all, too
drunk too often to muster
up a helmet hard enough
to penetrate and pray:
O I was plenty wounded
when I surrendered to
Your mental opiates,
aesthetic pleromas like
blue beauties and pale
beauties beyond the
empty bitter tide of days:
Roethke’s verse, Eno’s
Pachelbel Variations,
Bach harp partitas,
Pynchon’s downed
parabola scouring
every swoon in hell
with wings I felt
but could not flex:
How sweet those ambient
amniotics which gave
birth to us in Your
womb, a pure sweet
lactal nougat of a divinely
dark swole boob: How was
I to know that a far older
wilder stranger man would
break from the waters of
those shadows, a vast
maturity which had little
to do with me or my years
like a man rising from
a ten thousand year old
sleep from an ancient mere,
hairy, haunted, magnificent,
angelic and terrifying,
St. Michael riding on
the shoulders of his dark
and darker precedents,
a sea god who rules the
vastest waters of my heart:
O I felt him flex his wings
when I strapped on my
Fender Strat and let the
horses go, hammering
those power chords
nailing every angel on
most high with a soaring
screech of song in precise
reverse amplitude to
the size of my ding dong:
Loved that huge angelic
howl, gutteral and gluteal,
roaring with the lust
of Danes on dragon ships
with axes the heft of
Ireland’s split skull: Too
bad I never could make
anything of it, not a buck
and far too fucks as
wild as the songs I screeched
of ‘em: Too bad I never
could last for long upon
that stage, partying too
hard, commiserating too
late at night with my
wounds’ bandinage: Yes
well that was part of
his salt sooth, the way
he came to speak to me,
under my vaulting hopes:
How many defeats before
I came to love his blue
sense, his vatic reckonings
in the danger and the
breakage and the second
world it wombs: He is
my genus, strange, peculiar,
his brogue almost cipherable
but not, incessantly dark
& strange, speaking in the tongue
of tics and puns and slips
of the tongue, a jarring bit
of leftness which makes
what’s right most wrong,
revealing a seal’s belly
which is only surficially
a tum tum, but also a
scarred fundament,
basaltic, old as stars,
the womb which spat
the moon up in its
haunted sky to rule
these moody tides
I call song but are
really rides on
singing’s blue dingdong:
He and I are strange
pals and quite different
from the liege which
ligaments you to
your own dark strange:
If I were to reel out
my prized fantasizes you’d
take offense, halted by the
puerile reek of it: You’d thank
me for sharing then beat
it for the door: No one likes
the smell of someone
else’s farts but to their
flatulators farts are
close and sweet-sour
old, intimate, stinky
with history’s prized
turds: The song of my
dark man apparently only
rings most true for me:
Its threnody I guess
is so woven of one
pair’s counterpoint
that whatever makes
its sound in a collective
blue the organum’s
too peculiar, its key
and mode not heard
on shores for a millenium
and soon enough lost
here, tossed back into
my immortal bath: I share
it not so you’ll sing along
but so you might have
some metaphoric
equipage for listening in:
Believe me, one he (or she)
sees you on your own
out there standing at
the silvered well, he
(or she) just won’t stop
belling up ever Bozo
buzz and buss to throng
the manic bus: Take all
my seems -- sea, well,
voyage, cape, selkie,
dark garden, dank pantheon
of first wild crimes to break
and riot in my heart -- And a
language begins to form
offshore my tongue which
the deeper man sings
inside the booming surf:
An informing rhetoric,
if you will, which argues
for a fructive wild midground
between opposing worlds:
What do such words permit:
What worlds do they not:
I wish it were simple but
he’s one riddle of a joke,
offended by the light:
He bids me sing in his
own black tongue though
shores of sense drift
far from sight: He laughs
still in my daily rounds,
delights in awkward sounds
& Faustian faux-pas: I’m
in the groove here on his
back aboard the joyous wave,
but when I go upstairs
to coddle my sick wife (the
flu, after so many headaches
& stomachaches, disorders
whirlpooling down from a
hard look at closing shop)
there are shit stains on
her clean white sheets on
my side of the marriage bed:
Heavens, how the hell
could I so besmirch her
view with that odd male
carelessness? She’ll never
read a word of this and
pines for me to learn
her tongue: Will I ever change,
will she? Will we change toward
the center of the bed where she
and I can talk as satisfyingly
as I talk with him in the dark
beds further down? My tastes
have changed over the years:
Perhaps they’ve been rearranged
by him, two leagues deeper into
the forest, to the left of daily
sense: In my youth it was
busty blondes on flaming
poolside chairs, but now
it’s dusky auburns with shoots
of red peering out half
in shadow from a darkened
room, or staring up from
the wave: I’m an ass man
who gets no booty with
a tooth for truth and beauty
& no longer afraid to
make a verbal ass of myself
bending over every numen
in the wake: Oh its a lowland
gauge this dark language,
dowsing with the dream,
the heavy sore blue balls
of the seal-man dragging
over heaven’s rune’s below:
His words from in my mouth
and ink begins to flow,
a flood of first and last augurs
I’ll never truly know
though its sugars salve
his dark blue undertow.





BLACK ANGUS, ST. COLUMBA
AND THE SEA-WITCH

From Fiona MacLeod,’s Iona

On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-shore. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the Faoilleach Geamhraidh, the day that is called Am Fhéill Brighde, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.

The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the butterfly break its shroud.

Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.

“My blessing upon you, O Ron,” he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his. “Droch spadadh ort,” answered the seal, “A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown.”
“Sure now,” said Colum angrily, “I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear.”

“Well, well,” replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as God knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; “well, well, let that thing be: it’s a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter.”

At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.

“It is a man you were once, O Ron?”

“Maybe ay and maybe no.”

“And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?”

“That is a true thing.”

“Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?”

“Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus.”

“A fitting name too,” said Colum the Holy, “because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end God has in store for you.”

At that Black Angus laughed.

“Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?”

“Well, it is because of the good company I’ll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen M’Vurich?”

“Kirsteen—Kirsteen—that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!”

“O, a name here or a name there s soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?”

“No.”

“Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!”

And, with that, Black Angus leaped into the green water, and the hoarse wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the shore like a wind-spent mew.
Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. “God is good,” he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the grass, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.

As he drew near to the House of God he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.

“Who is Kirsteen M’Vurich, Murtagh?” he asked.

“She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea.”

And when was that?”

“Nigh upon a thousand years ago.”

“But can mortal sin live as long as that?”

“Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisin sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M’Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-shore, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea.”

“And is death above her now?”

“No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the seawitch.”

“Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?”

“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”

“And who will he be?”

His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal be is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”

“Black Judas, Murtagh?”

“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”

But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.

So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, “God be with us”; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.





THE LOW-LAND

Like other legends deeply rooted in folklore, the Atlantis story may have in it an element of truth. In the shadowy beginnings of human life on earth, primitive men here and there must have had knowledge of the skining of an island or a peninusla, perhaps not twith the dramatic suddenness attributed to Atlantis, but well within the time one man could observe. The witnesses of such a happening would have described it to their neighbors and children, and so the legend of a sinking continent might have been born.

Such a lost land lies today beneath the waters of the North Sea. Only a few scores of thousands of years ago, the Dogger Bank was dry land, but now the fishermen drag their nets over this famed fishing ground, catching cod and hake and flounders among its drowned tree trunks.

During the Pleistocene, when immense quantities of water were withdrawn from the ocean and locked up in the glaicers, the floor of the North SEa emerged and for a time became land. It was a low, wet land, covered with peat bogs; then little by little the forests from the neighboring high lands must have moved in, for there were willows and birches growing among the mosses and ferns. Animals moved down from the mainland. There were bears and wolves and hyenas, the wild ox, the bison, the wooly rhinoeros, and the mammoth. Primitive men moved through the forests, carrying crude stone instruments; they stalked deer and other game and with their flints gurbbed up the roots of the damp forest.

Then as the glaciers began to retreat and floods from the melting ice poured into the sea and raised its level, this land became an island. Proably the men escaped to the mainland before the intervening channel had become too wide, leaving their stone implements behind. But most of the animals remained, perforce, and little by little their island shrank, and food became more and more scarce, but there was no escape. Finally the sea covered the island, claiming the land and all its life.

As for the men who escaped, perhaps in their primitive way they communicated this story to other men, who passed it down to others throughout the ages, until it became fixed in the memory of the race.

None of these facts were part of recorded history unitl, a generation ago, European fishermen moved out into the middle of the North Sea and began to trawl on the Dogger. They soon made out the contours of an irregular plateau nearly as large as Denmark, lying about 60 feet under water. Their trawls immediately began to bring up a great many things not found on any ordinary fishing bank. There were loose masses of peat, which the fisherman christened ‘moorlog.’ There were many bones, and, although the fishermen could not identify them, they seemed to belong ot large land animals. All of these objects damaged the nets and hindered fishing, so whenever possible the fishermen dragged them off the bank and sent them tumbling into deep water. But they brought back some of the bones, some of the moorlog and fragments of trees, and the crude stone implements; these specimens were turned over to scientists to identify. In this strange debris of the fishing nets the scientists recognized a whole Pleistocene fauna and flora, and artifacts of Stone Age man. And they remembering how once the North Sea had been dry land, they reconstructed the story of Dogger Bank, the lost island.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us