She is (not here)

A three-day weekend, having my mother up on Friday night and into Saturday, a bit of rural r&r for her -- she slept like a baby here, both in the night and for a nap on Saturday afternoon which she requested. Chalk that up to my wife’s amazing gift for creating nourishing and comforting environments, something in her eternal self-denigration says is something every woman does, denying her quintessential skill at it ...

Then Sunday it was yard work all a.m., a nap and quiet inner work in the afternoon -- finishing up Antony and Cleopatra, working on some poems, reading the Sunday New York Times while my wife took more stuff into her soon-to-close booth in Sanford, agonizing over what to do next. Hard rains mid-afternoon, a solid half hour of incessant pour, my how the land needed it. ...

And yesterday we were out for a day of perambles through the markets, hitting Webster around 8 a.m, my wife finding all sorts of stuff she like (rare) -- an impeccablly embroidered white sheet, a pillowcase, a metal planter, a dazzling orchid with yellow blooms on one stalk and white-and-purple blooms on an other. On the car radio, bits of the September 11 remembrances, all so faded these days in the great mass of the country -- I guess, if you didn’t lose someone in the towers or have a relative get killed in Iraq, the sense of sacrifice is intangible, like cumulus in a humid later-summer sky ... Though souls surely whipped through the aeries of that breezy day, a high thin absence making our rounds seem off, unpurposeful. No wonder we bitched at traffic and meals and each other. As if we were carrying on something that wasn’t quite the point at all.

But maybe that voice disquiets from within, in a place I can’t name but seem closer to, with these circuitous posts ... ghosts of the age, my aging, of bedposts drowned long ago when I declared myself home and woke quite alone ...


***

In characterizing the unconscious as theorized by Freud, Lacan strips away some associations with it which I have held dear -- shall I go there too, in his way, without my genius angel, without its devil depths? Do I have a choice? I mean, I’ve read this way to here because She led me. Each morning meditation is an immrama of the text, ever in search of an island of the everbedded unio of blue dreams; the wave I commit myself to flows to and fro and round and in Her unquiet salt demesne; She shores me here, today, to write these lines, astonishing maybe only to me, to her too, to hear me say them ...

***

“The Freudian unconscious has nothing to do with the so-called forms of the unconscious that preceded it, not to say accompanied it and which surround it today.

“... Freud’s unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of night.

“... To all these forms of unconscious, ever more or less linked to some obscure will regarded as primordial, to something preconscious, what Freud opposes is the revelation that at the level of the unconscious there is something at all points homologous with what occurs at the level of the subject -- this thing speaks and functions in a way quite as elaborate as the level of the conscious, which thus loses what seemed to be its priviledge.

“.. The phenomenon of the unconscious ... In the dream, in parapraxis, in the flash of wit -- what is it that strikes one first? It is the sense of impediment to be found in all of these.

“Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these pheneomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. There, something other demands to be realized -- which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality. What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious.” (pp. 24-5 passim)

***

A supreme consciousness of what consciousness lacks, demanding to be known its own terms, in its own language, incessantly sending semaphoric waves across the gap, splashing us here and there with the surprising intuition of a present Otherworld, an vast within ....

***

“Now, as soon as it is presented, this discovery becomes a rediscovery and, furthermore, it is always ready to steal away again, thus establishing the division of loss.

“To resort to a metaphor, drawn from mythology, we have, in Eurydice twice lost, the most potent image we can find between Orpheus the analyst and the unconscious.

“In this respect, if you will allow me to add a touch of irony, the unconscious finds itself, strictly speaking, on the opposite side to love, which, as everyone knows, is always unique; the expression ‘once lost, ten to be found again’ finds its best application here. (p. 25)





ORPHEUS

Sept. 10

If I am Orpheus
the love-saddled poet,
then You are my
twice-lost
everpresent bride,
the memory of love’s
addlement amid
seaweeding shades.
I sing and sing
my dearth of You
to every ghostly
curve in the
blue choir, finding
never redress of
the ire, instead a
pure requital’s
vestal fire, fanned
by the bellows of
these lungs which
refuse to quell,
much less suspire.
My love songs find
indifference in
Your awful blue,
my touch too fleshed
and warm for
the intercoursings
of lost bones.
If I truly wanted
You back,
would I not try
wooing Your way,
composing dirges
with lifelike ambients,
the foam of ebbing
waves? But union
would prove disaster,
a surfeit of which
would snuff the very
fuse of every song:
And so I stand with
both feet planted on
your grave, singing
so loudly I can’t
hear you whisper
back in this
morning’s dank
black breeze. What
I want of you
is impossible
and so I’m ever
free of it, a sailor
of verse incunabulum
with not a drop
of birth in sight.
Orpheus was quite
content, I think, to
watch love fade
to black -- it inked
his pen and kept
his lute-strings merry.
It’s always been
the singer and his
song of Her
exclusive of
the bride, a music
of fake oceans
which keeps
every real one wide.





EURYDICE TO ORPHEUS

Sept. 10

You sing about loss:
Try it my way
with nothing to lose.

Try voicing loss
without a throat
and mouth and tongue,

without a brain
to name the
cerements which

once swathed
a beatless heart.
Without feet
to walk alone

in moodless shade.
Your song might have
wowed the court

of Avernon, but
how could I be
much impressed,

having nothing
left to woo?
After your suit

(beautiful but false)
I followed Hermes’
wand the way

sparks trail meteors
across the sky;
followed to the rim

where you turned
to catch the show
of me fading

back across black Lethe
like water into water.
That was the story

you sand up there
-- who would contest
it, anyway? -- but

no: I leapt back
just as you turned
& become

the nubile scar inside
your stare which
never fails to see

me everywhere
that beauty empties
out. Down the taproot

of the songs which
crazed the maenads
to full roar I walk

in vestal nothingness,
a shore where no
ocean crashes and careens
and no lovers bed and

rapture amid no foam’s
egressing.sighs.
Try losing my way

if you would have me.