The Siege Corryvreckan

Thrilling and trilling those tensed webs we create around the labyrinthine mystery, like a musical note, sounding us deeper into unnamed corridors. That it is endless is the gift, isn't it? That this entranced romancing through an empty labyrinth keeps waltzing into the next stranger room of the dream; that one poem always beings where the last left off; that each embrace is never final; that the shoreline slowly slopes down beneath us, one fathom, three fathoms, five, fifty, five hunderd, five thousand, fifty, always deeper, diviner, darker, more dubious, duplicitous, double-tongued ... incessantly down and round we go, each time more earnestly, informed, assured, although each round leaves us at the same departure point more stupefied & fooled & frustrated.

How could such travail be our greatest and least satisfying jaunt? Do we not tire of the eternally circularity of it, where nothing seems to get done, where each shore or bed or signifier only implies something further behind which may have more significance, more truth?

It's not the stuff that worldly things are built on: my marriage doesn't depend on such verbal whirligigs: nor does it contribute one sou toward my mortgage; I get no cardio benefit from galloping my verses in the froth of hooves I cannot name; it doesn't help a fellow drunk or make me any more courteous on the daily commute; our cats could give a shit about the tremendum of my Otherwordly gambols and conceits, they just want food and loveums. No: all this serves an Otherworldly purpose (porpoise), and like Las Vegas jaunts, whatever I accomplish there stays there.

The Lacanian unconscious (if I'm reading him aright), is structured like a language, but a dark one: sensible to itself, witty, florid as a dream, prone to fortuitous slips, and incomprehensibly a drone to the dayside working ear. Yadda yadda yadda et cetera ad infinitum ad nauesum it goes on and on and on, the blubbering idiot atop the upside downward throne falling down a deep blue well. Falling in the gap where You and I will never meet. It's sick, compulsive, god and wormlike at once, black magic and blue ouija, my soul's sore repitoire, bleeding gorgeously forever out my mouth.

Is there benefit at all in articulating such dark depths? The jury's still out. As long as interesting things show up squiggling and gleaming in the next hauled-up well-bucket, the work is worthwhile enough in the hour which precedes first light -- that time for crossing over, for giving thanks to God inside the belly of His whale.



What house is not rocked by desire and eventually or not steadied and mortared by love, that larger incessant demand which proceeds from desire into its enduring (though less flashy) certinties?

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, we are told how Vortigern, king of the Saxons and father to Arthur, attempts to build a fortress on in the hills of Wales, but each day’s beginnings of the work is torn down overnight by some mysterious agency. He consults his court bards and is told that he must find a child with no father, and mix that child’s blood in the mortar. Men are dispatched across the land to find such a boy; in Carmarthen they find one and bring him there with his mother. But this is no ordinary boy, this is Merlin, son of a human woman and a devil (thus explaining his extreme hairiness). He challenges Vortigern’s bards as to why it is necessary that he be sacrificed in order to make the walls of Voritgern’s castle stable. They cannot anwer. Merlin “sees” into the ground and tells Vortigern that if he excavates the soil beneath the castle stie he will find a pool underground. Vortigern’s men dig and indeed they find a lake. Drain the lake, Merlin says, and you will find two hollow stones, each containing a slumbering dragon. The pool is drained and the dragons, one red, one white, awake and begin to fight. At first the White Dragon prevails but is eventually overcome by the Red Dragon. The White Dragon symbolizes the Saxons, the Red Dragon the Britons, we are told, and the message was “clear”: Fight back against the treachery of the treacherous Saxons and you will prevail.

That’s a reading which could support the dynastic claims of the Edwards, yet always the truth is simpler, deeper, darker. Is desire the white dragon, first principle to rouse from the waters below, and the red dragon heart-centered with love?

Is the reading equally true in reverse? Do we always read passion as love -- the white dragon -- dressing up every raw need and hot jot in its sable? But is the red dragon of passion superior, regnant in the truth of the deeper waters, beyond love’s incessant greed for reunion, a trope on the metaphor of birth, returning it to its far more ancient principle of life waking and rising from the very sea in the primal pulse of survival?

Interesting indeed ...

THE KELPIE
OF CORRYVRECKAN

Sept. 4

Cleo. I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.
Ant. Then must thou needs find a new7 heaven,
new earth.

-- Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra I.i.18-28

I have no dwelling beyond the sea,
I have no good ship waiting for thee.
Thou shalt sleep with me on a couch of foam
And the depths of the sea shall be thy home.

-- Traditional rann,
from “The Kelpie of Corryreckan”

***

At midnight he appeared
out of Corryvreckan’s thrash
of maddened foam,
that whorl which picks its teeth
with masts and sailors’ ribs.
He was eerily young for
the hard hour, handsome
and malevolent, as hungry
for bridal sheath as
to bequeath a ghostly
maidenhead to that
spiralling-down
convulsing south.
He rode ashore on a wave
which changed as it curved
and crashed, wild waters
congealing into mane
and forming a white torso
where moon-fraught foam
had teemed insane.
Right where the wave
ceased up the beach
black hooves palavered,
thundering mad surf
over pale heath and turf.
Man and horse marauded
across that deep night,
withering and warping
whatever the hooves
in his heart touched.
He was hot to pry
that gap in a shore-
maid’s eve-tide sighs
where girdles and saddles
liquefy and turn
until a Corryvreckan
roars down and
through upsoaring thighs.
Such unknickered
plunder dreams hottest
in their hearts
sleep at the hallows,
after midnight
on Beltane’s flood tide,
when grand deceivers
woo their wildest
believers.
He wilded through
the sleeping villages
calling soft her name,
horse and rider
like a shadow
shadowing the darkest
rooks of night:
Til at last in the smallest
hamlet down the coast
he felt a tremble in
the town’s thick sleep.
A light quickened in
a window: then opened:
And she was there,
her red hair down
wild and long, like
strands of the same
kelp which the rider
had tucked up and
tried to comb clean
of his stallion’s mane.
She stared eyelessly
out in the dark -- seeing,
no, needing his too-
black approach,
so much that
it only took the
smallest finger
of moonlight
through tree limbs
to reveal her
smile’s beacon
to his own.
He pulled her
through the window
in one haul
then held her fast
in front of him
as they paired
on the wet
leather saddle.
He cried: Away! and
the beast raced hellbent
back to sea, encircling
her with the iron will
which hoops all
trothings fast.
Surely she was terrified,
but he laughed for
them both like a
sudden gale and stormed
back on the strand where
Corryvreckan mashed
the sea so swole and
malevolent as to seem
the world’s own heart-wound,
the very mound where
every desire sucks and
draws us round to doom.
Laughed again, then spurred
his beast to haul full
into the cruel mash of a wave --
too cold, too deep, too forceful
for the maid. She screamed
so loud it carried all the way
inland, rousing all
from sleep; the sound
tolled once and then
was gone, silenced by
what all the locals knew
too well, each crossing
their heart and clutching
closer their rosaries.
And then the
air was simply night,
a trilling of insects
and a lone dog’s
barks, idle hoverings
above the distant
mashings of the sea.
It’s said at flood-tides
you can see the pair
down by the shore, the
man-horse with the
seaweed in his hair
holding his ghostly lover
from behind, racing up
and down the beach
while she cries for
home and pleads him
ride harder faster
now now now
and Corryvreckan
rounds and rends
its God-deep roars.



In an online forum a friend talked about the divine circulation of energy, how that flows into us first as a sexual impulse - an ennervating, enlivening desire to plunge and bower the world’s hot brightness — which we either sate with physical sex or sublimate it into some other activity.

Regardless of how we pass on that energy, our ability to do whatever we do with is precisely balanced by our capacity to receive it. The engines don’t go without fuel, and the tanks are in constant need of replenishment.

Thus there is a tidal motion in the circuitry, a loop which requires receipt and surfeit, and psychic (or soul) development is that education we receive in how to manage those energies, or rather how they manage us.

Transformation occurs both in the god and the god in us as we attune to the process. The trickster has his way with us as the infantile, boob-addled Cupid, firing his arrows indiscriminately, raising hell for the hell of it, a real terror to tribe; and then he falls in love with Psyche and becomes Eros, an adult function, the one who suffers to reveal himself to psyche, for whom psyche suffers in turn with a love that eclipses Aprhodite’s golden sauciness.

And anima — the lucent aura behind the beloved — evolves from witch (think of Merlin enthralled into a stone prison in his passion for Niniane) to soul mate (and all of the confusions that go when divine and mortal blend in one face) to the interior function, her eyes to help us see the inward visage of the outer world, the part of the world that’s holy, the wet part of the sea.

Growth never stops; the circulation becomes more gradated, attenuated, polyphonic as we articulate and attune to the process. So what I hear as the peep of a birdsong unfolds and unravels its long scroll of coded meanings each time I return to it, each time I try to listen not only with the ears but all of the ears in me, so that bird has the voice of an angel and a narhwal and chapel choir and tree in the middle of paradise where the souls of all my loves and histories are gathered.


CIRCUITRY

2005

In younger days when I was a drowning
nocturne of purely puerile thrall, sex was
an amplitude of only two levels,
dread silence and high shriek. The
fabileau of my days and nights sawed
me back and forth without mercy or
grace, my lack a frozen tundra of lunar
dearth, my hunger for pillage of women’s
beds a wolfish and feral despot, limiting
my every night to that pursuit. My
daily libido was like the tides of a billion
years ago in the age of awfulness, when
the moon was huge in the sky and
still bloody with its birth from the sea,
daily hauling waves hundreds of miles
inland and then back, too hard and loud
for any life to take hold. I kept
mines awash with booze, lubricating my
every transitional surface with that
disillate of gods that trapped all
beds in bottles, all nights to one-night
stands. Awful, and yet looking back
I now see a compulsively high devotion
to a primal drama that was not mine,
zoned beyond my futilely thrusting hips
to a preliterate titanic age that was coded
and striated in the blueblack howl of
worldwide balls, my semen’s gorge rising
like the cudgel of the Cerne giant, its
hooves leaping mountains like the
Uffington Horse. Me, I just droned
in to dionysian ends, drunk and suicidal,
smacking my lips down to the bottom
of the cistern where I was torn apart at
last in a glee of red brutish claws.
There at last I slept, the final chord
crashed down, the silence ringing with
that old surf’s savagery & the night
absolutely dark, no moon, no woman,
no hope of going back to the nothing
I had become. There I dreamt
of harrowing down into the grave
where I lay still a long while
and then sorcerers detached
from cavernous walls to reassemble
my scatter, my organs sewn back,
my liver emended, gallsack drained
and re-fitted, my testes retrieved
from the bottom of the sea
rich with the salts of abysm,
my brain given wings and a fish-tail,
my heart hammered anew with
full view of all of its rooms and floors,
its walls and valves made porous
and tough, both sea-worthy and
ground enough to build something
sturdy upon, a library perhaps,
or a cathedral, or a good enough
song, or a house fit for love.
I turned 30, I quit drinking, I
got married, became a stepfather,
I settled down into a hard house
of love & got to work in a daily
grind of labors. All of that was
amped by the old loud thrall for sex
but that loudness was now poured
into two dozen striations,
canonical hours of the flow —
dream-work, studies in myth
and psychology, writing poems,
reading poems aloud as I walked
to work, working harder than
I ever had before, serving the
corporate father, singing in
every space of him the song of
the mother, working out at
the gym & loving the old wild
thresh of my limbs, the high
and dazed buzzing of beach-ions
in the dazzle of my post-exercise
high, walking back home in
the gold saturate of day’s end to
a house where all of the difficult
work of love waited for me —
walking through the living day with
eyes wide to nipples glazed with
milk, to birds singing on telephone
wires high above all the appropriate
names of God that I hadn’t heard
before in the loudness, the night
traffic outside howling those old
inappropriate names with the
vengeance of gypped ghosts. At home
I worked daily in the salt mines
of love, learning all the ways love
burns hot where sex will not, my
first wife fighting a tribe of
personal imps for a free hour with
me, the desperation in that effort
rounding the caesura of our
small island serenities, walking
together and talk talk talking,
the taste of an apple afterward
cathedral in its sweetness, in
all that old juice roaring just
as loudly but in deeper, less
apparent registers. And all of
that doomed to fail as it must
as the great wings learned to
fly between I and thou, to
fin the waters of sex in
sublimation, no less for disappearing
in so many new ways from all
of the old singular vista.
In the years since — through
divorce and wandering and
high sex and low, to remarriage
and rassles with old truths I
did not want to know, nearly
divorcing again and hiding for
a time back in the belly of the
whale with a bed a babe and
a bottle of booze & then a long
travail coming back to this home,
and more years of healing slowly
without much sex here to this hour
of 4:30 p.m. in a house of good and
durable love— : Along that travail the
tides have slowly changed, mere ripples
now at the old ravaged shoreline
but booming hard & harder below.
As an aging drunk’s tolerance
for hooch ebbs to where one sip
is too much, so one kiss now suffices
to ban my heart’s ice, even though
I ever wish for more and diddle
the dream in sanctuaries I have found
safe from melusines and bottle-
sprites — like travailling through You
each day, my Cape, the swash and
buckle of Your savage throat
jolly and feral enough to keep the
balls happily enraged in pen-strokes
and rapine of the page, in songs
thrown to indifferent winds. Outside
it’s cooler after two days of rain
and impeccably still. An hour ago
I heard a small mewl outside the
window; when I went close to check
things out I saw a small cat walking
away and then a fast flap of huge
wings as an owl crossed the street
and into a tree’s boughs above the
cat. It’s all there in that moment,
coded like that, the whole coiled
circuit of receive and release, wane
and wax, my desperate desire
for You fed by Your watery worlds,
hauled by your moon, lucent and
latinate, incarnate in all the ways
my heat exploded in those old lost
rooms of enactment, and returns to me now
inside the first bird of the day to
now sing, amid such a moist and
halcyon chill. Just one note will do,
exactly where old seas were darkest blue.


The distribution of the motif of “Clashing Rocks” is an indication its prehistoric antiquity, and refers the complex pattern of the Urmythos of the Quest to a period prior at least to the population of America. The signs and symbols of the Quest of Life which have so often survived in oral tradition, long after they have been rationalized or romanticized by literary artists, are our best clue to what must have been the primordial form of the one spiritual language of which, as Jeremias says (Altorientalischen Geisteskultur, Vorwort) “the dialects are recognizable in the divers existing cultures.”

Here, for the sake of brevity, we are considering only a single component of the complex pattern, that of the “Active Door.” It has been quite generally recognized that these Wandering Rocks, “to pass between which thou must thyself find a means” (Juelg), are the “Mythical forms of that wonder-door beyond which lie Oceanus, the Islands of the Blessed, the Kingdom of the Dead” and that they divide “this known world from the unknown Beyond” (Jessen in Roscher, Lexikon) that, as Cook, endorsing Jessen, says, they “presuppose the ancient popular belief in a doorway to the Otherworld formed by clashing mountain-walls.” The Planktai Petrai, in other words, are the leaves of the Golden Gates of the Janua Coeli, of which in the Christian tradition, St. Peter, appointed by the Son of Man, is now the Keeper.

***


Thus the way “to break out of the universe” (Hermes Trismegistos Lib XI.2.9) into that other order of the Divine Darkness that Dionysos describes as “blinding by excess of light” and where the Darkness and the Light “stand not distant from one another, but together in one another” (Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, XIV, 78), is the single track and “straight way” that penetrates the cardinal “point” on which contraries turn; their unity is only to be reached by entering in there where they actually coincide. And that is, in the last analysis, not anywhere or when, but within you; “World’s End is not to be found by walking, but it is within this fathom-long body that the pilgrimage must be made.” (Samyutta Nikaya 1.62)

Our soul is, as it were, the day, and our body the night;
We, in the middle, are the dawn between our day and night.
(Shams-i-tabuiz, ed. 252.12)

Of every land, that Dark Land is the best,
In which there is a Water, the Giver-Of-Life.
(Niza_mu’d din, Sikandra Na_una LXVII, 18)


— all in Ananda K Coomaraswamy, “Symplegades”

___

CLASHING ROCKS

Nov. 2004

I knew there was a door
to eternity in that surf.
I thought it was ecstatic
and pure and free.
Two or three times in
my bad gamboling
I encountered a woman
on a night when all else
faded to a drone and
the world became a
singular motion from
lips to lips and hand
to breast, her hair
falling over my face in a
a red-gold wave of
silky fire. All the world’s
possible waters narrowed
to this single strait,
a well or font which
redeemed to powers
of ten or a hundred
the ten thousand ways
I’d lost her on all
the other nights.
Two or three nights
I found the door
unlocked and She
inside smiling on her
bed of swimming blue,
singing blue psalteries
which washed me
clean to birth
and sent me far far
out to sea in the
coracle of a woman’s
drowsy curves. Eventually
each time we woke
on a beach some yards
apart, and the sound
of a cruelly crashing
surf sent us further
apart and away from
the bed of wonder
we once shared in
some place we’d never
find again: And departed
from each other
bewildered by the
whole bouree, embittered,
smarting from heart-
wounds the sea just
slapped and mocked
with salt. Alone again
I’d face that surf
and see the waves
as walls which kept
me jailed inside all
the ways I wanted out.
Each foray back into
the bars was a launch
against that tide, praying
to lost gods to change
my luck to guide that
arrow loosed by my
desire this time into
that blue wall and hit
some heavenly latchworks
and allow me passage
through the straits
of love yet one more time.
Years of that bone
minstrelsy, piping sweet
airs on a strand composed
of smithereened skulls
and aons and the
wilted pricks of loverboys, all
careened and drowned
in that hostile surf.
Eventually I
hung that wild carouse
on some coathook
by the door through
which I passed to
enter my real life,
the one I passed through
to begin to work and age
and even truly love.
Who would guess
those Symplegades
would part once I
surrendered all assault?
It makes sense to me
now in that blue
infernality I pickeled
in sitting in this
big easy chair: For
as she is upside down
and backwards to my
every meaty motion,
a widdershins egress
to my life’s hot
progress, so the
passage through that
door which hides in
every wave’s collapse
is one (today) of
stilling the horse
before he leaps:
To pause at every
hellbent Yes that
reaches wildly
in the wave to find
ghost handles
and let Her reach
back Her own way,
to turn the knob
in me — here — inside
the bower of a salt
surrender which isn’t
a surf at all, nor
any door, nor any woman
that I’ve met in this
life; not the jazz of
of ball-saxophones
though they surely
bray their hard bop
swoon: The horses
I sing here are all
of whimsy, with
manes of silver foam,
my ocean dry as paper
and inked in black
carousals where
godlike verbals roam
for some short while,
just a poem’s length,
which always ends
in rooms She’s been
in before, maybe only
an hour, a kiss apart:
Tomorrow I’ll be back
for matins at this tide
to sing of singularities
as narrow as the
sea’s pale blue hips,
deeper than this
page is wide, almost
a brush of lips.




***

It seems unlikely that any coast is visited more wrathfully by the sea’s waves than the Shetlands and the Orkneys, in the path of the cyclonic storms that pass eastward between Iceland and the British Isles. All the feeling and fury of such a storm, couched almost in Conradian prose, are contained in the usually prosaic British Islands Pilot:

“In the terrific gales which usually occur four or five times in every year all distinction between air and water is lost, the nearest objects are obscured by spray, and everything seems enveloped in a thick smoke; upon the open coast the sea rises at once, and striking upon the rocky shores rises in foam for several hundred feet and spreads over the whole country.

“The sea, however, is not so heavy in the violent gales of short continuance as when an ordinary gale has been blowing for many days; the whole force of the Atlantic is then beating against the shores of the Orkneys, rocks of many tons in weight are lifted from their beds, and the roar of the surge may be heard for twenty miles; the breakers rise to the height of 60 feet, and the broken sea on the North Shoal, which lies 12 miles northwestward of Costa Head, is visible at Skail and Birsay.”

- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us