Winter Ghosts

When an old cultural canon is demolished, there follows a period of chaos and destruction which may last for centuries, and in which hecatombs of victims are sacrificed until a new, stable canon is established, with a compensatory structure strong enough to guarantee a modicum of security to the collective and the individual.

- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

***

The sixth century BC was an era characterized both by psychological and intellectual unrest when the utterances of prophets were believed to be inspired, and the miraculous feats of shamans were generally accepted. Best known of the former were the oracles of Bacis and the Sibyl who, whether historical persons in origin or mere generalities attached to a class of individuals who claimed to possess a direct approach to god, are yet of importance as being typical of the kind of authority to which men appealed during the ferment of uncertainty of a period yet uninfluenced by the beginnings of rational thought.

-- John Pollard, Seers, Sirens and Shamans

***

... you have learned to falter
in this good way: stand still, walk on, remember—
let one by one things come alive like fish
and swim off into their future waves.

— William Stafford, “In the Museum”

***

.. originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, an all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a great or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with a narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpoint to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe -- ... the “oceanic” feeling.

... In the realm of the mind ... what is primitive is .. commonly preserved alongside the transformed version which has arisen from it... When this happens it is usually in consequence of a divergence in development: one portion (in the quantitative sense) of an attitude of instinctual impulse has remained unaltered, while another portion has undergone further development.

-- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, transl. James Strachey

***

The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontravertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged by childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. Thus the part played by the oceanic feeling, which is something like the restoration of a limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground. The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness.

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents





PRAYER FOR OUT KITTIES,
OR, THE SONG OF THE NEXT SONG

Nov. 26

Where there is danger
there too is hope.

-- Holderlin

Rough and rude outside
at this darkest hour,
cold and heavy-winded,
pure misery for those
stray cats who refuse
to come inside or
even climb into
towel-lined boxes
that would proffer
the sign of a
warm bower.
Misery too for
an age that can’t
yet find the swaddles
of what it awakens;
our darker gut
tells us it’s there,
just over the margins
of our thought,
outside our religion,
despite all the
tools we’ve
forged to break
the last remnant of
its semaphores
down and in.
I can’t name it
but a prescience
tells me its Him,
the fish in full
fervor astride his
blue-foaming wave, a
even-green impulse
hollering the news
toward every shore
of what it means
to let go the reins
& let the totem
go where it sings.
A faculty for horsing
the insides of things
wherever You deign
in Your next savioring,
after all the wrong
towers tumble into
illegible dreams.
Cold winds engender
babes in our manger,
but such bitter bluster
must first make more
than a few stray
cats miserable outside
where we flee and
wander and seek.
It all sucks a big one
going down one drain,
vacating the temples
and cities, making
hallow the stiletto-
heeled wallow of
forever-rich folk,
emptying
the sea itself of
all traces of roguery,
alkalines, salt,
melting the icecaps,
drowning the page
of its once-singular
vocal, that lighthouse
subsumed in a
vast digital glare.
Going, gone perhaps
when none of the relics
still glow in the night.
And there’s not a
damn thing I can say
or should but I do
anyway, praying,
bless those sweet
kitties, Grandfather,
envelop them in
an accidentally
comforting nook
in Your brutal black
cloak as You
ravage on over
astride the next
wintry roller
I squawk and margin
and slowly discover
inside the next
book’s dying-to-
be-found ogham
stone covers.



MASTERY

2002

Glenn Gould launched a brilliant career
as a pianist at age 24 when he recorded
Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Shortly before
he died at age 50 he recorded them again.
He told an interviewer that he recognized
his style in the earlier recording—wild
runs and trills, bright surfacings—yet
its heart seemed unfamiliar. The material
was the same—he’d always loved the Master’s
genius for exploding many ideas at once—
but his own way of riding that music had
deepened so much that the earlier talent
sounded strange, like the sound of
someone walking outside a dark, wet window.

On the later recording you can hear
Gould humming along as he played.
He hated the habit he’d formed over the years,
and it made hard work for the engineers:
Yet he knew he always played better
dancing along with his voice. Imagine painting
while you dreamed, or making love in a storm.
There is a mastery which finds the heart
of the heart and learns how to stay there.
None of that was apparent to the younger man.
It took decades for Gould to find the
deeper handles of mastery. I think of him
walking outside that house trying to go home.
Of one day finding a door, not in what he knew,
nor in the brilliance of his hands, but by
abandoning himself to what opened when
the keys of the piano ceasing running; and flew.