Deeper Words

To continue on about this “talking cure.” Rollo May shows the importance of correctly naming the disease -- identifying with that bad spirit yammering in the whiskey bottle, owning up to one’s own shadow. But he also tells us that naming is not enough, that it only solves the first half of the problem. A deeper sort of naming is required.

***

“The daimonic needs to be directed, channeled: and here human consciousness is important. ... Consciousness can integrate the daimonic. This is the purpose of psychotherapy.

“Native psychotherapy often shows us exceedingly interesting and revealing ways of dealing with the daimonic. Dr. Raymond Prince, a psychiatrist who lived and studied with the natives of Yoruba for a number of years, filmed a fascinating ceremony which I offer here as illustration.

“When the tribal mental healer is to treat some members of the community for what we would call psychological ailments, the whole village participates. After the usual rituals of the casting of bones and a ceremony that is believed to transfer the problem -- be it sexual impotence or depression or whatnot -- to a goat who then (as the “scapegoat”) is ceremonially slaughtered, everybody in the village joins together for serval hours of frenzied dancing. In the dancing, which constitutes the main part of the healing, the significant point is that the native who wants to be cured identifies with the figure he believes has daimonic possession of him.

“... What is necessary for the ‘cure,’ then, is that he confront and come to terms with this ‘demon’ in himself.

“... In the frenzied dance he then ‘invites the daimonic,’ welcomes it. He not only confronts the devil toe to toe, but accepts her ((in the case of an impotent man with an evil mother complex)), identifies with her, assimilates and integrates her as a constructive part of himself -- and hopefully becomes both more gentle and sensitive as a man and sexually potent.

“... The principle is, identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you.”

-- -Psychotherapy and the Daimonic.” in Myth, Dreams and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell




BRINE SANCTUS

April 2005


Reflexive insights may arise like the lotus
from the still center of the lake of meditation,
(but) creative insights come at the raw and
tender edge of confrontation, at the borderlines
where we are most sensitive and exposed --
and, curiously, most alone. To meet you, I
must risk myself as I am. The naked human
is challenged.

-- James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis

The grand plan on which the unconscious
life of the psyche is constructed is so
inaccessible to our understanding that
we can never know what evil may not be
necessary to produce good by enantiodromia,
and which good may possibly lead to evil.

-- Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit
in Fairy Tales,” CW 9.1, 397

I keep my Cape at full-bore howl
to seep the blue folds of my song,
deeps of saturate salt bliss
I call a shore for love and God.
Here at the wildest lull of night
when old passions lay split
in silt-deep seas, I lure their
ghost-bells back with lines of
inky blood, verses of black
heart-spoor and blue-balled
verbiage, spews & spouts from
the hundred rooms I woke in
no closer to You than when
I headed out into the fraught
and riven night in hope
of pale white beaches,
surf drowning every door.
Every night of that old
awfulness is caught between
these lines, brute and scaly,
blue-glittery, a steely ire
which is both fang and booty,
obfuscant drouth and wave-
cathedralled fire. My compass
was drowned those nights and
perfected in their soak,
erect now to every northern
latitude to spasm this far
south, a high-low fricative
which prows the worst wet
pass & plunge that devil
sphincter in songs of honeyed sass.
Such is the brine sanctus
You tolled in my ears
while I was drinking to the
dregs the worst booze of
winter nights, an awe distilled
from awfulness which
you pour in equal measure
from this pen at this
lonely, God-stilled, jasmine-
fragrant hour.
Perhaps this poem will
find that night again
in which I clenched
and died at last, the
one in which I flooded
at last through a secret Cape’s
infernally blue throat.
My every heaven’s
pubes are thickest round
the maw of that eternal rout.




OK. But we find at the center of this labyrinthine truth a decided shift or turn which decides whether one drowns in talk -- forever staying the victim of it -- or it allows one to walk on to cure. To resume with May:

****

“Experiencing is absolutely essential; but if it occurs without the changing of the patient’s concepts, symbols, and myths, the “experiencing” is truncated, and has a masturbatory rather than full procreative power.

“The way man has gained power over the daimonic historically is by the Word. This is demonstrated in the crucial importance of knowing the name of the demon in order to overcome him.

“... Referring specifically to the drunkard’s proclivity for evading his problem through calling it everything else, ((William James)) writes:

But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.

“Many therapists, like Allen Wheelis, speak of their task as “naming the unconscious.” Every therapist must be impressed almost every hour with the strange power the names the psychological complexes or patterns have for the patient.

“...It has been argued that the relief the patient gets is that the “naming” gets him off the hook; it relieves him of responsibility for making a technical process to blame; he is not doing it but his “unconscious” is. There is truth in this.

“... The Word does give man a power over the daimonic. The Word discloses the daimonic, it forces it into the open where we can confront it directly.


“But the greatest danger in the therapeutic process lies right here: that the naming will take the place of the changing; we stand off and get a temporary security by diagnoses, labels, talking about symptoms, and are relieved of the necessity of using will in action or loving. This plays into the hands of modern man’s central defense, namely intellectualization -- using words as substitutes for feeling and experience.

“The Word skates always on the edge of the danger of covering up the daimonic as well as disclosing it. When Apollo, the intellectual, argues in the Oresteia that the Furies be banished, he is using the cultural arts to fragmentize man, to suppress the daimonic and truncate human experience. Athena, who “reconciles the opposites in her own being,” rightly refuses. By accepting the daimonic Furies, welcoming them into Athens, the community itself is enriched. And the furies have their names changed: They are now the Eumenides, the makes of grace.

“This ambivalent character of language requires our asking what the ancients meant by the Word which has power over the daimonic. They were referring to the logos, the structure of reality. “In the beginning was the Word” is true experimentally as well as theologically. For the beginning of man as man is the capacity for language. This Word can be communicated only by symbols and myths. It is important not to forget that any healing process -- even what each of us with a common cold is to do about his viruses -- is a myth, a way of looking at oneself including one’s body in relation to the Word. Unless my illness changes my myth of myself, I shall not have distilled from the trauma of illness the opportunity for new insights into myself and self-realization in life, and I shall not attain anything that can rightly be called a “cure.”

- May ibid.

***

SHUT UP & DO IT

Oct. 15

There is talk and chat,
the swelled verbose,
the naming too. And
there are words under
all that worth drilling to,
worth egging on to birth.
Does that equate to
more words always,
or does more simply
serve as that stay against
conclusion which
so poorly suffices for
a life? Round and round
I’ve gone on and down
a page, a pro at rant
and cant, at rhyme
& meter too, as if
the bone metronome
were sufficient water
for this parched hour.
But is that as
important as making
love near?
Could I have it so
wrong? A cool October
morning this, my wife
in bad arrears over
the failure of a
9-year business
& me feeling so inept
at saying anything
which might be of help,
just shut up with the
peptalk drone but
don’t clam up with
the salt commiserations
she needs to harrow:
Be the stupid fall guy
who follows her on down
to whatever must be
suffered through,
getting to what counts
the most. No dark
angel here, the dark
itself just and hour
still faint with a
Saturday night’s
crisp cackles -- distant
hiphop songs, a rooster
revving up a few blocks
away & our house
creaking in its struts,
burdened, failing even,
with so much real
work to do. So shut up
and do it.



FOAM JONES

Oct. 16

I could spend the rest
of my life’s mornings
on this floating coffin
of one song, chanting
salty lines between
the tines of a devil-
seeming sea, singing
til the thrill full spills
her blue dress on
every spoken shore.
It’s just me here with
my hips pressed
to a musing melusine’s
sailing hips, getting
the whole sea down
sip by sip
from her wave-
milking ripe plump
nerps. Writing thus
I’m forever just
offshore, short
of saying it, never
coming because
going’s hard, drained
before first light.
Delay becomes
the charm
which seals me
forever down the
sidhe of Niniane,
my Yes her ablest
spell, the thrill
of her the blue gills
which breathe me
toward every
bottom, my mouth
a scoop spilling
silt & sea-booty
& coarser
verbotens, hauled
up from the tills
I’ve let myself pickle
in whilst swooning
up the swale.
No, naming is not
enough. I could
spoon these ranns
forever trying to
measure out a
sea’s girth and depth
& still be just
another sorry
victim of the
old sea tides,
the shadow sound
of long-crashed waves—
gorgeous, yes, harmonic
with the sea’s harrumphing
choir, it’s true,
but oh so ebbed
and empty
nonetheless. A worm
of metaphor, lord of
his own ocean-
sounding nautilus
washed up at the
bottom of the night,
dreaming fast
in black paradise
while the world
forgets its proper
name & turns
fastly toward the
wall. Can
a sick mind find
cure through the
vast extensions
of its word? Do
poems die when
they settle for
the sound of nearby
shores they pray
to never reach?
Those blue labials
up and down my
pen are spit-lush
comfort to be sure,
a pleasure I
do not care to
limit quell
or measure:
But do I thus
outrage life
by trying to
seal myself
back in its blue
womb? By
refusing
to walk out past
the beach where
love almost
always began,
am I just a
trope of a
rope tied round
both waists of
nothing?
Oh boat coffin
are you empty
because the
mind of my drowned
dear friend is
empty too? Are
you echo of the ghost
of an old voyage
mouldering into
nothing on a shelf
two thousand fathoms
down from this
soon-to-wake real
day? And if so,
what words are
then proper to
say a prayer
for him here?
Is this box
empty because
we’ve lost his
father’s father’s
father’s name?
Or is it that
the name is so
moot as to
empty high
and lower heaven,
simply not
the point at all?
To name is not
to say the depths
all names too
archly father:.
I’ve told all
about my love
but failed importantly
to say how much
I fail her sitting here
telling you about
her face n tits n ass
walking forever
down the same
departing shore.
We’re still here,
me at the pad
& she upstairs
in an embittered
& embattled aging
woman’s sleep
no words I know
can comfort,
merely provoke.
Last night I woke
to see her standing
over me before
getting in bed --
watching my face
I guess -- then
stroked my face
and said something
I can’t recall,
important words
I should be
saying here
I could just
get over their sound.
Among the missing
relics from that box
I come to call
my heart
is that which
swelled to hurl
dread spears into
the naked girth
of God, a mile off
the course of this
dread ship
of shopworn verbs
& faux whale oil
going down again
inside this sinking
nib. He was always
unerringly about
what I still always
fail to say,
though I try, though
I try. Not much else
to write today
but that I wonder if
that loony Pilgrim’s
hat my pagan friend
wore at the mast
of his last toss
has washed up
on some distant shore
like the sated head
of Orpheus, floated
on enough beyond
this dreadful,
bloated drone.
Whoever finds that
hat please toff it
once for me
in remembrance of
the man still
lost in the jones
of wave crashed foam,
the man forever
singing to his
own far drifting,
still burning bones.