The Ages of Man

Prelude

The riddle of the Sphinx (from the old mother goddess culture) which Theseus solves, ceasing the practice of sacrificing young women to her (he also gets the city & can marry the widow of the king, his mother), goes like this: What is it that first goes on four, then on two and eventually on three? Crafty Theseus thinks, and answers: MAN. As a child he walks on all fours, then as an adult on two, then as an old man on three (two legs with the aid of cane, or his ever-wounded dick.)

The Sphinx throws herself into the sea, and Greek civilization leaps forward.

***


I.

Friday 11/17

While the primacy of the genital zones is being established through the process of puberty, and the erected penis in the man imperiously points toward the new sexual aim, i.e. towards the penetration of a cavity which excites the genital zones, object-finding, for which also preparations have been made since early childhood, becomes consummated on the psychic side. When the very incipient sexual gratifications were still connected with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct had a sexual object outside one’s own body, in the mother’s breast. This object is later lost, perhaps at the very time when it becomes possible for the child to form a general picture of the person to whom the organ granting him the gratification belongs. The sexual instinct later becomes autoerotic, and only after overcoming the latency period is the original relation re-established. It is not without good reason that the suckling of the child at the mother’s breast has become a model for every love-relation. Object-finding is really a re-finding.

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty”

***

The transformation of the child into the adult, which is achieved in higher societies through years of education, is accomplished on the primitive level more briefly and abruptly by means of the puberty rites that for many tribes are the most important ceremonies of the religious calendar.

... (The) secret dimension of the world is the revelation of the men’s rites, through which the mind grows to knowledge, and after beholding which one is far above the plane of the mental system of the child. It is a marvel, a source of wonder, well worth the pain and fright of a second birth.

... The imprint irreversibly established in infancy as energy-releasing signs are (here reorganized), and through an extremely vivid, increasingly frightening and unforgettable series of controlled experience are in the end to be so recomposed that the boy’s course will be directed forward into manhood; not to merely open, uncommitted manhood, but specifically to a certain style of thought and feeling, impulse and action, comporting with the requirements of the local group.

- Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology



In the puberty rituals
of Lascaux (as best as
we can figure and
imagine), male elders
dressed up as bugaboos
and stormed their
camp at night,
hauling off the
screaming
girly men
while the
mothers dutifully
wailed and tore
their breasts. The
boys were then
manhandled through
Lascaux’s brute
mouth and forced
down a half-mile
of black descents,
at several junctures
having to squeeze
between walls clenched
tight as death.
Separated from
the mothers they
lived in such union
with til then,
they moaned and
chattered through
the cold harrows of
those halls,
bloody, wobbly,
eyes wide to nothing’s
blackest stare.
Something in their
psyches was torn
away like a foreskin,
leaving them raw
and wide open to what
the fathers would
do next.
There, in the deepest
caverns of the cave
complex, a torch
was lit: And the
whole panoply of
the animal hunt
foregrounded by
their unmasked
fathers’ faces
screamed into
their eyes.
The essential
ritual lay in
a man’s panoply of
elks and mammoths
painted again and
over for 30 thousand
years; it seared
forever in their
brains the image
of the men they
must become
and muster in
their own sons’ eyes.
Here was the second
birth into the
man’s adult life.
And thus the
tribe’s elders
reined in those
budding bucks
whose genitals
had outgrown
their mama’s tits
and were now
thirsty to for
a darker milk
sapped in their
mother’s laps.
Right at the
precipice where
they were about
to leap back
into their mothers,
the fathers impressed
those pricks
back into the
primal stone
which girders all
men’s loins;
then steered
their appetites
toward the
tribe’s survival
in the grand
libido of
the Hunt. Thus
the myths transferred
from walls to mind
through a womb
carved in a man’s thigh,
offering both figure
and ground a
nurture for our nature,
a culture both
archetypal and
tribal so unitive
that the practice
went unchanged
for 300 centuries,
there in that last
room of the million-
year dreamtime.




II.

The river-god Acheloos (“him of the silver eddies”) is set by Homer above Okeanos, “the origin of everything.” Acheloos could beget seas and streams, springs and fountains, just as Okeanos could. When Okeanos was portrayed as an old man with the horns of a bull, the prototype of this portrayal was Acheloos. In other pictures and descriptions, the shaggy head of Father Okeanos -- which as finally only a mask, a countenance of deep, almost sorrowful gravity -- sprouted a lobster’s claw and feeler. The bull’s horn played a special part in the tales concerning Acheloos. Herakles fought with this water-god, as well as with the Old One of the Sea and with Triton. Like these latter, Acheloos had a lower body consisting of a serpent-like fish. But his head was horned, and one of the horns was broken off by Herakles. From the blood that dropped from the wound the Sirens were born, a birth similar to that of the Erynnes. {In one tale, Gaia is made fruitful from the blood shed by her husband Uranos in his maiming/emasculation, and gives birth to the Erynnes.}

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks

The situation in America today is not that the sons still need a symbolical patricide and a ritual reminder of it in the form of a totem meal to keep alive the memory of their crime to keep any of them from stepping into the slain father’s shoes. That spirit may have survived as long as there was still a western frontier. The cultural behavior pattern of North America has meanwhile developed into mere contempt for the father. Present-day American culture is no longer motivated by rivalry with the father arising from ambivalence between respect and hatred of him. What is taking place is centered elsewhere, and incidentally includes a non-respect for the father with very little affect indeed.

-- Alexander Misterlich, Society Without The Father (1963)

We walked from the sea
like Jonah, spat from
one immensity to
walk inside a
dream that
had held us in its
own blue thrall
for aeons. Slowly
and without mercy
Gods faded into
kings and heroes,
those mortal appropriations
of formerly divine aloofs
which ebbed mystery
to forward thus
a history. Herakles was a
man to beat the gods,
strutting with a
teen’s fool cajones,
invulnerable,
rassling every father
of fire and water,
causing the Golden
Age to fall.
He bested the Old Man
of the Sea and
Triton; even Archeloos,
that half man half fish
who was by some
accounts the oldest
blue divine of all.
Herakles broke
off one of his horns
in the rout; blood
poured from
a god’s wound
into a strange
deep womb which
in turn gave
birth to Sirens.
Those figures were
thus half of the
most ancient
father -- perhaps they
gout his eyes -- and
half of that wild
boy-man who refused to
be tutored in the ways
of men. Herakles
was Hera’s glory
and her curse,
a mother-deranged
boy going after
dad in a red cape
and trunks, filled
with a parricidal sort
of self-loathing
that makes one
spend his life beating
every man and fucking
every woman. Call
this man the
outrage of Lascaux,
modernity’s prouder
steel father,
a man without
a ritual, the undamned
cock of free will
swinging loud and
proud in the advance
of thing while
bringing culture
to its knees.
He’s stronger than the gods
in the bent imagining
of the stillborn
adolescent, that room-bound
boy who won’t come out,
addled with purply
visions of TV wrestlers
& comicbook heroes
& Bonds of every stripe,
swollen on the tit
he never quite let
go of as the years
of a life drain full away.
The Sirens haunt the
hero as mysteriums,
the strangely familiar
song of foregone
labors in the service
of a lost maimed king.
They judge the hero
unworthy & choir
him to doom,
singing of rapine
& booty & endless
jousts at the bottom
of the sea he stole
from his father. It’s
a song he’s sucker
for, & jumps naked
as a Pict Beowulf
into the wild blue.
He dives and dives
but never gets
down there,
drowning exactly
where he tossed
his father’s horn
so bloody into
the sea. It always ends
right there, in
full heroic collapse
of one to other;
aged and no longer
strong, he faces off
with the next young buck
who skewers him
clean through with
a profaned steel cock
which is the pride
of and mast of his
intemperate sailing.
Such is the new succession,
the next trope on the old
ritual where boys
succeed their fathers
by lopping off their
heads or horns or
balls. Cronos
sickled his daddy’s
dick and his son
Zeus dispatched
him in turn to hell.
And all the later figures
were bewitched by
Siren spells, swinging
bright blades into their doom.
The hero masks the
father’s face we lost
when the son refused
to do as he was told;
the Sirens thus
have a vengeant cast,
like Furies, demanding
horn for horn
that place in our
psyche where
Lascaux graves the sea.




III.


We have been describing a secret identity of the two halves {senex and puer}, two halves not of life, but of a single archetype. This secret identiy of both faces that are actually one face with only some differences of feature should not astonish us, since a corresponding feminine union of sames (the Mother-Daughter mysteries) have been placed at the center of the feminine personality.

... Without this polarity, which is at the essence of the archetype and holds its meaning together, there is perfection but no process, no movement from here to there, from past to future. A tension of ambivalent opposites its the structural precondition for change.

... The main characteristics of each half shows parallels in symbolic forms with the other:

The Holy Old Man as Attik is concealed and as Saturn has his head covered or cloaked; Harpocrates, the boy, is hooded, faceless or covered; so too Attis and telesphoros. saturn has a sparse beard; Mercury wears his first downy beard or a small beard. Saturn is taciturn and guards secrets; Harpocrates has his fingers to his lips. As Mercury is winged, so can Saturn-Kronos, as Aion, or on tombstones, be winged. Both are related to the dead, to time and eternity, and to the Golden Age ... Both show abnormality of the feet ... Saturn is lamed and crippled, the foot of Attis is bound, and Mercury has winged foot-gear and the unbeatable heel of Achilles of heroic illusion. One cannot walk, the other can only fly. The deformity points to their being only a first or second half of the whole reality.

-- James Hillman, “Senex and Puer”

Friday morning, 10 a.m.,
sitting on the upper deck
above a cool clear sunny
sky -- it’s in the 50’s --
squirrels in the oak
at the back of the yard
scritching down at
Red who’s always game for
game. His prey eluded,
that stray cat we feed
now sullenly tests a patch
of sunlit grass to
resume his long day’s nap.
My wife’s out at estate
and yard sales, her stomach
knotted tight with
worry over finding work,
paying bills in December,
hosting Thanksgiving
for her family next
week & all the other
merry lunacies
of the holidays season
which we do not
so much celebrate
as commiserate:
love is aging her and hard.
Meanwhile I have
this day as a timeout
from my own manic
schedule, to luxuriate
here in our home,
write more, delve deeper,
listen to my jazz and
classical CDs, read and
nap and write some more.
I’m home alone with You,
Grandfather, with so
much work to do;
though more and more
I wonder why I bother.
No one cares to read this stuff
& the pile of words just
keeps getting higher
& my will to write it
shrinks in measure
like the shadow
of a libido to make
ends meet, beleaguered
by the lack of
means to reach those ends.
I’m getting old for this
shit & my brain just
ain’t that smart. I’ve
tried to get back to
the deep blue nature
of that swimming pool
where puberty woke
me to gods and demons,
high heaven’s
lemony tarts
squeezing something
in me til Your juice
ran down my leg,
but it seems to
me a blind way
in a much less
sighted world.
Can a wounded man
sire his misbegotten son
in memory, and worse,
only on a paper page?
To what end? Lord knows
if my youth was damaged
today’s youth is an nth
dimension worse, unfathered
even more by their
unfathered dads, unfettered
and unshod, galloping
loose along the shore
& spouting fluorescent jisms
of a noctal silk so black
that surely it is the
dark energy which cracks
our future wide.
Is this tumulus of
words any good for
them? I sponsor
newcomers to AA with
tutelage as fierce as
the priors of Lascaux;
it’s By the Book or Else,
no less, 12 steps out
of the black forest
& then round and
round and round
those steps to
drill their margins
into hopelessly
pickled brains
& all of it mere
preparation to
give it all away, that
sponsorhip which
keeps the elders sane.
For arrested drunks like
me there’s no other
way to keep the plug
in my doom’s jug
than by staying faithful
to the worst truths
in the tale, by keeping
the memory green.
A dark part of my history
is stuck in a whiskey
bottle with an
ancient devilish spirit,
the boy who refused
to jump into
the whale-mouth of
Lascaux & killed
his daddy instead.
He’s the eternal
adolescent with balls
the size of Herakles,
draining every shot
glass in the swamp
of ginned-up jezebels,
basting in the dregs
of Hell. I save myself,
perhaps them too,
by keeping my attitude
true to the AA way,
the straighter and
by the Book the better.
This instruction of
blue verse serves
no one but me in You,
as far as I can tell,
but it is part of
that same program,
schooling the wet
brain in the ways
of deeper water
that thoughts may
be fruitful for the tribe.
Amid much aging
weariness and ennui
and nulled sex I sing
the rockhard man
who found a woman’s
shape inside the
last room of those caves,
a world he married
with his tongue
and cock and spear.
I can’t go on with
this sing-song toll
of heaven’s drowned
bells without his
strong young hands
pulling pulling on the
rope I weave and coil
with these words.
There’s just too much
dross and clutter
outside and in --
our technoculture
burning everything
to cinders of old
meaning and my
verbal arteries so
clogged with books
and songs and dreams,
so much of everything
turning into pure
white ungluing noise.
We need Your help
and mentoring so
desperately Grandfather,
and it’s all that I can do to
set these masques on
paper which may yet
drag that yet-unmanned
boy in me down through
a hole at the bottom
of that pool, and pitch
him into awe and
awfulness where
You still may be revealed.
And if this is just
bullshit, another
day’s pointless salt drone
-- I think much on that
these days -- well, at
least I’ve kept myself
amused & singing
the praises of a cool
sunny day while
a self-drunk world
drinks itself away.
At least I’ll go
whistling & erect &
proud out into
the lost surf
of an old infernal
amplitude set
so low that
whatever I’m here
shouting will
never be heard
out loud. Place
a Siren exactly
here to mark
my grave. Perhaps
some boy will
find it on some
much later day
& read the music
caught between
my lips and hips
and she-shaped rips
I am.



IV.

Saturday 11/18

Mythology ... is progressive, not regressive. And the rites themselves, through which the new sign symbols are impressed on the minds of the growing young in such a way as to recondition the entire system of their innate releasing mechanisms, constitute one of the most interesting and crucial foci of our subject. For it is precisely here that we confront directly the problem of the meeting of the general and the particular, of the elementary and the ethnic, in the field of youth. The initiation rite is the cauldron of their fusion.

And should the fusion not take place?

If it should happen in the case of any particular individual that the impress of the socially enforced reorganization of the infantile imagery should fail of its proper effect, that particular individual’s personal system of references, and consequently of sentiments, would remain essentially infantile and therefore aberrant, isolating, shameful, and frightening, so that the sort of disorientation known so well to the psychoanalytic couches of our contemporary, literarily instead of mythologically and ritually educated civilization would inevitably result. In the traumatic experience of his second birth the individual would have suffered an accident precisely comparable to a misbirth or physical accident in the first. In which case, of course a regressive interpretation of his peculiar mode of experiencing the imagery of local myth would be in order. However, for the psychoanalyst then to make use of the fantasies of that regressive case as a key to the scientific understanding of the progressively functioning and mythology and ceremonialism of the social group in question would be about as appropriate as to mistake a pancake to a souffle.

-- Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology



Ah, but that young man
is pure buckshot,
blown out of childhood
through the twin barrels
of such troubled
parents. My dad suffered
my early years inside
a closet of gay heat,
cloistering his bum-
honeyed pecker inside the
puritanical arrears
of church and home.
He clung to us
in flighty desperation,
warm when he
was there and simply
gone when he was not,
fleeing like a shost
on the subway
far down under us
into Chicago’s
icy concrete mansions
where he worked
and ployed and played.
My mother
only wished to mother
but also bore the cross
of a father she hated,
a man who died
quite young to her
delight (he was in
his fifties). Alas, she
married that man’s
ghost in my father,
a man’s man who
couldn’t understand
(or feared) the nth
part of a woman.
Thus her breasts
for us grew sickly
and galled, depressive,
cold with fear,
desperately in love
with her children
as we fled into our rooms.
When they split
I was 13; she moved
us far South from
that city of gay angels
and far-too-wintry winds,
nursing our wounds
in a house in
Florida that had
a pool right next to
an orange grove.
Having hauled us
back to her womb,
she then went under
the knife, having
her sex cut out &
falling down through
that wound into a
fundamentalist fever
of end-time demonics
salted by a booming
All-Father and at-end-
marriageable Christ.
My father gone,
my mother in retreat,
I entered puberty
hanging on to the diving
board for dear life
while my feet trailed
below in an abysm
of sweet wild blue.
Puberty was all about
finding an edge sharp
enough to cut my
daddy’s dangerballs off
and sever my mom’s
black umbilicus,
freeing me of the boy
I so loathed and was;
I dieted to lose the
baby fat, bleached
my hair blonde
and blonder in the sun,
picked up a cherry-red
guitar and swung
it all: All to swoon
those neighborhood
girls who came
to my room & sat on my
bed while I played
Grand Funk songs
for them. Their new
daddy, our hero.
Thus I committed
the ancient crime,
swinging with glee
a scythe across
my God’s earthly balls,
chucking them
back over my shoulder
into the sea I’d
left behind when
I was baptised
a second time.
I was walking -- no,
running -- into
a wild grove of
my own choosing,
amped on a magnitude
that was mine, all
mine, like a breast
of blue sweetmilk
I had swallowed
whole, with impunity,
in the pure greed
of a boy getting
his world at long last.
No wonder She
rose exactly where
I abandoned my
father roaring wounded
in the tide of his years:
she emerged perfect
and whole, the
complete complicit
complicate enchilada,
blue eyes, angel lips,
blond hair hanging
free to her nerps,
her waist pure
cerulean, waving
hello to mine,
slowdancing with
me to Cream’s
“Badge” at
Cotillion in
my rapture of a
a loud rock n roll
band: Venus my
penis’s massed bugaloo,
crashing forever
down love’s vernal shore.
I saw her in class
and dreamed her
into the life I so
wished, there beneath
gooey sheets of
my nightly frigs,
paying close attention
to infinite details --
the way she gripped
me at the song’s
end sighing Yes,
how she lay back
one the seat of
the car I would own,
eyes advancing into
me as I pushed her
down, the way
her belly fluttered
as my hand breached
its border, no longer
refusing, never again
quite alone; how her
bra lifted up and off
like a house falling down;
the squeeze of those
budding squirters filling
me like a sea of perfect
blue motions of softly-
lapping ecstasies. Night
after night I sang her
back up from the tide
with my hand, gripping
this pen in the first
caterwaul with a dying
father, doing him in.
This was 1972, when
all the sons of this
country were about the
same work, defying
the father as they
died in his war, smoking
dope and blasting hard
rock into the jungle
night, shooting the major,
shouting at Woodstock,
shrieking with glee
with a junior’s
pink panties balled
in my hand, thrown
over my shoulder
getting all of her at last,
someday soon, I prayed
those spermed up lone
nights to the god
I was becoming
in the fountains that
surged. Prometheus
bound to a Marshall
stack, to the rack
of his glorious thievery
in the name of
the new father,
the next stumblebum
to pillage the henhouse.
Did You bless or curse
that curve flint sickle
handed up to me from
my depths, the one
which I used to slice off
one pecker and spark
up the next? Grandfather,
it was You in her
shape, gleaming naked
on the surf, walking directly
at me with eyes like
the sea? Its cold this
morning, 45 degrees,
the hour -- 4:30 a.m. --
still as the stones which
wall up my father’s chapel
far far in the north. That
boulder in its center
is beneath this writing
chair like the coronation
stone stolen from Iona
to Scone to Westminster
Abbey and back. That
boulder is silent here,
which makes me believe
I’ve got it all terribly
wrong -- or right, in
every way that all
fathers must be beheaded
in the name of the son..
This is the season
of the Old King’s despair,
the oldest time of the
year between harvest
and winter solstice --
A withering, dying
time, when all fructive
juice retreats underground.
The hand writing here
is the fag end of that father’s
son, smoked down from
confusion and belligerence,
a cock’s ghost stone
dreaming Venus and
all surfside sport
on a fatherless white
shore, where everyone
but me is female and
naked, glistening with
coconut and pussy
oils, forever at leisure
and undying pleasure.
My reality is just an
errant wank in the shower
maybe once a week
& the prayer of my
wife getting in the
mood maybe once a
month or so &
infinite treasures
of that soak within,
sighing ready and willing
on the page I here jester
for an audience of one -
You, Grandfather, oldest
king of my kind’s tribe.
Don’t get me wrong -- I
have a daddy for sure,
a big well-aged man
of soul, made of winds
and Scotch and
and towers of brute stone --
His blue homiletics
are mine, loud over pews
that rib the ancient whale.
But You tore the mystery
of that man loose from
the misery of my history
with him, separating
dominions, as You will,
calibrating the scale of
awe and awfulness
as inversely proportional
to the boy who mans
the whale. It is by this
difference I remain a
married man, revering the
real woman of my years
while rapturing my
dream’s downy billows
here. It took a long time
to fully digest the
vision of that wave;
to distinguish appetite
from savor, the virgin
kiss from the hell it
savored in the afterglow,
in all that eerie undertow
awakened and ravened
and distilled. Can I
write any more? Each
day I seem to sing
longer and longer still,
refusing to end the tale,
sure or hopeful that there’s
something more essential
freighted further down
the cavernous harrows
of my tongue. But maybe
it’s just fear of silence,
of going it alone
into modernity
without even the song.
Do we never grow
up, clinging to that
strange distant music
I heard once when
my mother sang
over the sea, again
when my father
stood up at the pulpit
and preached immensity?
Is my work simply theirs
but worse, as they damaged
their own bloodlines?
Or is it Your’s my iron Moby,
Lascaux’s curse that
is never quite safe
from the swirly curlicues
of highly nippled verse?
Perhaps? But I’ll talk
it out here, for this
is the only converse
I seem to have left
with fathers in the fields
by my culture
yet to work. Cap this pen
with this old bone song
like a hearse afloat
on my first father’s
sea, a poem skulled
in wild cursories..
If I speak for You,
then let’s sire a son
fit to hammer the
next set of nails
full through our box,
yielding these overripe
nuts to his oh-so-soon
to swing down blade.




V.

Sunday 11/19

... Simultaneously with the overcoming and rejection of these distinctly incestuous phantasies, there occurs one of the most important as well as one of the most painful psychic accomplishments of puberty; that is, the breaking away from parental authority, through which alone is formed that opposition between new and old generations, which is so important for cultural progress. Many persons are detained at each of the stations of development through which the individual must pass; and accordingly, there are persons who never overcome their parental authority and never, or very imperfectly, withdraw their affection from the parents.

-- Freud, “The Transformations of Puberty”

Kronos has left to us associated with his own memory, the memory of the Golden Age. His kingdom coincides with this happy period of the world history ... The closeness of the connection between the two is indicated by the further story of Kronos, which other poets have told more fully than Hesiod. In that ancient Golden Age, honey poured from oaks. The disciples of Orpheus were convinced that, when Zeus enchained Kronos, the old god was befuddled with honey. (In those days there was no wine.) Zeus enchained the old god in order to carry him off to the place where he, Kronos -- and with him the Golden Age -- still exists: at the outermost edge of the earth, on the Isles of the Blest. Thither Zeus betook himself with his father. There the breezes sent by Okeanos bathe the tower of Kronos. There he is king, is husband of Rhea, the goddess, enthroned over all.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks


Homer and Hesiod
singing Mysteries
into psalms, writing
down the gods.
Columba at Iona
inking gospels
on an abbey’s
parchment ground
so wet and wooly
that Oran sang
from underground.
Chretien de Troyes
and his jongleur
tribe pouring love
into the Gothic
ear, awakening
a stout devout
which pushed God
to our rear.
Minds emboldened
on the uncasked
wine of pagan
lilt -- I whirl
the Renaissance
burly here -- free
the bear called
Shakespeare,
that polar tongue
so new and old,
sporting every
sea in wild
mortality with
a new heat
and heart and
language, both
bottomless and
pure soar. The
Romantic titan
ego-artists Shelley
Keats & Byron
reaching up to
cleave the starry
balls themselves,
gathering in
their wings
the lungs of a Wagnerian,
world-collapsing yowl.
Joyce at the gates
of cyber in his
polyedrions of
scripture, a sentence
running into forever
rounding all the way
back to Ariadne’s
dancing floor. Pynchon’s
Rainbow, giving
a Hollywoody arcing
ache and oomph
to every hammer
flung toward Ys.
All these sons
crow in Your
cock the next
lost Golden Age,
renewing and deranging
the tribe with a
perplex, swoony
honey which on
the far ends of
our minds distilled
into ambrosia, half
sea half milk, pure
wine. When I set
pen to paper I
do it in remembrance
of You, Grandfather,
the one whose
crimes are legend
in their legion,
whose rule hinges
time to its eternity
down the miles
of a wild dark sea
beneath this writing
chair. When I was
14 and wanted sex
and rock and roll
in a measure meant
only for gods and
kings and fathers,
I was terrified to
wander far beyond
actual havens set
by church and home
& yet determined to
figure out a way
to hack those bonds
free -- booze helped
me sort that out.
I hefted guitar and
penis in all the ways
I dreamed and prayed
nightly between my
knees beneath the
sheets as I spouted
the first foamings
of Your spleen. My
history held all
these sea-enraging
singers in its thrall,
a booty I could
scarce imagine then
though they were
waking, slowly coming
into view in the
blacklit poster of
Flaming Love on the
far wall of my
bedroom, as Led
Zeppelin in the
radio filled my
pre-cultural room
with a cold
creepy aether,
the sense that
I had entered
the antechamber
of a vast descending
room marked as
much by divines
as by divine defiance.
It was a place I wouldn’t
name for 35 years
and wasn’t game for
until I had harrowed
down and round
the spiral doom
of Lascaux horrors
inside my bones
as they tumbled
down a whiskey’s
throttle. While I played
“Are You Ready?”
on my Fender
Mustang guitar
with Sue or
Derinda sitting
on my bed, I was
Grand Funk Railroad
on stage, invoking
gods of sturm und
drang my terrified
penis would take
years to find a
way to twist and
shout. Your old
salt catechism
which wakes
to dream
was somehow
counted off
between
those six sweaty
strings. And when
I set that guitar
down and tried
to preach my
power chords,
the pews were
filled with breasts,
libidios twin
vitales gunning
me right
up through the
middle sea
toward Saturn’s
Golden Age,
arousing oaks
which rained
pure honey from their
boughs onto
the forever-waylaid
someday-to-bower
pair engroved
ensealed in
puerish rapture
of the everwomb,
cuddling and rocking
and nursing on
she who’s always
worth some particide.
Not sex, not love,
but the unbridled
song hooving on the
biggest wave to
collapse on Your
sweet shores
here on heaven’s
main, this pure
white buck naked
page. Song after
song I hurl
your jisms, as
imperfectly now
as I then played
that guitar: Craft
is not the meat
but simply keel
for cruelest oceans,
motions which rouse a
perfection with nipples
as big as a boy’s
stout penis as he
dreams her up
beneath the sheets.
I cream and caw
and limn the lines
with a golden sigh’s
hung fever, that
cusp just before
the crash of
You wild waves
which haul
me out to she
who will give birth
to raptures even greater
in the next poem
I may write. Such are
the rhythms which
cannot end and I
am just one wave
amid the googol
to have rushed from
shore to shore in
the name of a salt
gospel stirred from
high and low. I pray
to let these starry
sons of ancient
foment go; to retire
from this task
when my lot of singing
has been through
the full measure of all
You meant to screw
upon the margeless
unpantied main.
Meanwhile I’ll pile
these hoary gems
of loquacious blue
in a chest sunk
down a zillion
leagues where all
my fathers’ bones
are still singing,
playing their guitars,
getting all the girls,
still married &
working hard in
those fields fard down
under which enrich
and loam the page
with an enduring holy
goatish rage. Am I
done? Hardly, when
my tongue is hard
and hot as molten
ocean-bottom
stone. Not when
the tower of Kronos
deserves a higher throne
erected by a song
of a gold night long
ago when I got up
under Sue’s t-shirt
at last, sitting together
on a parked motorbike
beneath a wild full
moon. Suddenly my
palms beheld the breasts
I had forgotten --
they were strange
in my rougher hands --
gelatinous and warm
where I somehow expected
something stout and
creamy, yes, a pour
which spilled down
my fingers and wrists
and arms to drown
me full below
in the lap of a dew
honey which drowned
one world & gave
voice and plectrum
to something
racing toward a shore
down at the far
end of the pool,
deep down dread Lascaux
where every stone is
swallowed and remits
a frenzy here.




VI.

Monday, Nov. 20

The destiny of Kronos develops in three stages, during which his potentiality unfolds and manifests itself. In the first stage the birth of Kronos is a violent and revolutionary crisis. Kronos succeeds in coming into the world only at the price of a violent rebellion against his father. A second stage follows in which the figure of Kronos takes on its central characteristic: placed between heaven and earth (the parents), he becomes an independent being, contradictory, dangerous, and problematic. He generates sons who are destined to deprive him of the power he has conquered. He had experienced in the first stage the severe test of a father who prevented his liberation from the fertile and enveloping womb, and against that obstacle he had turned the unmeasurable violence of his thirst for liberty. Now he himself is threatened by that same force and violene, born as inevitable consequence of his life and destiny. This stage we can call the conservative stage.

In the first and second stages the story of Kronos is essentially constituted by a father-son relationship of mutual competition, challenge, and violence. As in the first stage Kronos endures the hardness of the selfish father, so in the second stage he himself is the father who is frightened by the possibilities of his sons, and he too turns to deceit and violence in order to survive and keep his power.

In the third stage we see the breakdown of this dramatic figure: he is deprived of his reign, and while the generation of the Olympic Gods begins, Kronos turns to the other side of his destiny. We see him now as a king over a land very different from the Titanic battlefield. The nature of the God is transformed; he is the wise and beneficent sovereign of happy men; the earth produces her goods in abundance; men and animals live in harmony.

-- Augusto Vitale, “The Transformation of the Father,” in the anthology Fathers and Mothers, ed. Patricia Berry (Spring Publications, 1991)

Now these births
seem annual: from
Samhuin to Winter
Solstice as the dark
year settles down
into its cold latent
dream, I go back over
this primal ground
like a tribe returning
to its far-stepped
homeland where
amid the graves of
kings the omphalos
is found, a rude stone
dick with wings and
a throat of iron basso
welled and whaled
from Your zero, Your
first world-waking cry.
You carried me in
that totem’s thigh
while I pickled and
puckered all those
years trying to
wake from or
die of my own
father, unable
or unwilling to
put up my dukes.
You watched sadly
from the bower of
my grand melancholy
as I launched so
many frigates of
the name of that
salt freight I could
neither saddle
or name in bottle
or babe. Did You
agonize as all
fathers do or
rejoice in Your
wisdom to watch
me come
slowly to in the
icy testicular green
phophored gloom
of a drunk tank at
3 a.m., having
exhausted the ends
of desire, seeking
in Love’s wrong places
the milk of Your pale fire?
Blame it on my
culture perhaps that
boys remain boys
for so fucking long,
so many times --
perhaps most or even all --
forever; do You
always loom ahead
for us like that door
it is death to enter
and eternal dearth
to flee muttering
“whatever ...” ?
Well, thanks for
ripping me free as You
did, just at that
nadir when I
accepted that I
had supped full
well with horrors
and there was no
lie, no fancy I
believed enough
that I could find
my way out alone.
Like they say in AA,
there’s no going back
to being a cucumber
after you’ve been pickled.
It was only then
that I was ready
to approach Your
door at Lascaux,
entering that strange
brute mouth as
I read Carl Jung
and Joyce and Rilke,
their words salting
my mind for what
followed when I read
in Campbell’s Primitive
Mythology about
the old puberty
rituals, a tale
which me like
a brute ancient wave.
I travelled down father
Joe’s account of the
puberty rites at Lascaux --
my mind like those
boys, oppressed by
miles of deathlike
descent, finding myself
with those trembly
boys in the belly of
the whale where You
lit the torch and
the mystery screamed
full into view. The
grand mal seizures
of my crazy youth
were perhaps spasms
of that cold womb
which gave birth
to the grand whale’s
granddaddy lessons
inside Your ancient
thigh. Whatever the case,
it seems to me today
that I hung forever
on that diving board,
years and years,
quailing at the getting
on to the real baptism
down under. Perhaps
all the centuries of
civilizing progress
makes it take much
longer for a young
soul to get all the
way back to Your
shore. Or maybe in the
ages of a man its just birth
after birth after birth,
a continual spasm out
from the sea to
walk forth a free man,
feral, lonely, the curved
blade still dripping with
a father’s blood &
intent on reaping
every field of his ecstasy,
mortaring with those
jisms some Lascaux-by-the-Sea,
part conch, part
inner voice
drenched in low Sidhes.
Every year it seems
I give birth again
to the New Year King
from the hairy thigh
of an old myth
which I deem Your’s
Grandfather, that
wave’s cusping sigh
which folds to a roar
at the bottom of
summer’s pool in ‘71,
awakening me to
a flint exterior
keen for soft soak,
resolving me to plunge
through my father’s
yoke of throat
right into a female
not my mother
but close. Were
those Your elders
in the dangerous weave
of summer storm clouds
which formed above
and from the
poolside radio which
was playing the Doors’
“Riders of the Storm,”
invoking that dreamlike
swoon in which I
saw a mask of sorts
there at the bottom
of the pool, Your
Lascaux -- just
a fleeting glimpse
of that mad face
which cut the
umbilical cord
and married me
to its ghost.
I caught a fleeting
glimpse of Your
eyes and something
in me was struck
and lit, revealing
the inside usage
of all I wanted
so to name, my
feet trailing down
into the surgent
water as I hung
onto the diving
board becoming
vast and vaster
roots of a tree
whose canopy
was leafed and
hung with heavy,
dangerous fruit,
their nipples dripping
honey booze and
milk. At that moment
was no longer
a song but the
father of the tale,
entrusted by
Your dreamtime
to be its votive
and salt priest;
I’m still at my
offices, the dude
with the middleaged
frightmask waiting
for a reader to
find his way down
here, where I”ll
spring from Your
granite loins
and tear loose
the artiface
with a flash of
shock and awe fire.
It’s all I can do
to tend and tincture
that swimming pool
with salinity and
ocean motions,
throwing in the
occasional shrieking
curve to keep
flint sickles sweeping
in rollers of pure
verbal blue. I’ve become
a mad Manx on the
beach, full of fish
tales and pranks and lewd
jestering for an
Old Year King whose
rule slowly ends in
mine. The endless
iteration of the
lines comes from the sea,
it is the vast temple
complex winding down
from blue dapple
to holy black infernity
like stations of
a pourgatory that
belongs half to
me and the rest
to You, Grandfather,
the oldest pickle
in the sea. The Sirens
assemble and croon
from under that
undetectible seam
which holds and
yet distances fathers
and sons, like the
ocean between shores
or one song between
two mouths or
that grave which
bourns mortality
from its Other.
It is a raw cold
border which
those sweet-voice
Vixens love to
dry their black
wings on & stare
out on the world
with eyes like
reversals of the moon,
the quintessence
of that ambience
which filled black-lit
rooms, eerie and
ghostly and sexual
and more, heavy
with the father’s
breath as he intones
Obey, Oy Vey and Adieu
as I reach for her,
making all his
crimes my own
as I sought to do
the deed, thus
beginning again
the intricate descent
into the belly of the tale.
On the phone yesterday
my father told of more
chest-pains and weariness,
his heart unable to
keep up with and
ever-green blood
sapped from Your
ritual tree. Sirens
coo like folding
water which sounds
like a womb which
resembles that room
which You held
me in until I
was of an age
to crash and boom
on the Siren shores
of these pages
for better and
complicit ill.
I walk on three legs
now -- lamed by
actual years
but rock-hard and
long in my metres,
my long deep voice
like a third pedal
which lifts and
pounds huge flukes,
writing all of this
down down down.
The riddle whose
answer made the
Sphynx leap from
a cliff into the
doom-tombed sea
is that one I
ever pose here,
ferrying through
the ages of man
inside the same
coracle of aging
skin and viral bone.
I carry the
Sirens’ music in
these folds of ink,
an amplitude
which births a making
in horror and dearth
of You. It’s time
now to cap this pen
& get to work -- Monday
morning, a long full
week ahead -- short
production schedule,
a fifth step with
a sponsee, Thanksgiving
dinner here -- and
somehow I must
try to get this Cro
Magnon paean nailed and
caulked and launched.
Suffice to say -- Suffice!
-- that the fields of the
Lord are ever-loud and
roisterous, my enterprise
in Him a soul’s beaching
over and over on
shores of a song
which gonged in my
ready ears that
afternoon when I
was 14 hanging on
to the diving board,
Lascuax’s old purposes
manning me on
this porpoise which
may yet teach
sons to ride.