The Mysteries of Bliss V: Bliss and Emptiness

“To the religious-minded man of the Greek world, his divinities had always appeared in classical perfection since the time of Homer. And undoubtedly they appeared not as the fictions or creations of art but as living deities who could be believed in. They can best be understood as eternal forms,, the great world-realities. ‘The reason for the mightiness of all these figures lies in their truth.’ {Walter Otto}.

“As psychologists we may stress the fact that this truth is always a psychic reality; as historians we may add that the psychic reality of such a truth, as indeed of all truth, changes with time; as biologists we may call the alteration of the power that so moves us natural decay, but the essentially convincing inner structure of the classical Greek divinities remains unshakable for all time.

“We have a handy comparison in the kind of formula that gives us a clear picture of the balance of tremendous cosmic forces, that catches the world in each of its aspects as though in a border-line situation and presents to it to the mind as though the least disturbance of that balance would bring about a universal collapse. Every natural law is just such a balanced aspect of the world and is immediately intelligible as the mathematical formulation of a border-line situation.

“So it is with the figures of gods. In Apollo sublimest clarity and the darkness of death face one another, perfectly poised and equal, on a border line; in Dionysus, life and death; in Zeus, might and right -- to name only the three greatest. In relation to the cosmos as a whole, these divinities are merely certain aspects of it; in themselves, they are wholes., ‘worlds’ which have aspects in their turn, and contradictory aspects for the very reason that their structure combines contradictions in perfect equilibrium.”


-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology, 103-4




Here on this cool Sunday morning
on the last late porches of the year,
where the dark never quite leaves
the day, making light hang wan and heavy,
ever turning back to sleepy winter dreams:
Today I feel so far from those noctal
noons of the cocksure spirit
that even my imagination finds it
difficult to keep up this poem’s round
through every station in the
purgatory of bliss. Of late I’ve been
infected with a mood so hollow
that I feel close to the jumping-off
place of my old bottoms, that dreary
depth down the bottle where I
could not go on another minute feeling
so bad yet couldn’t bring myself
to end it all for good. Haven’t felt
that way in years. Yesterday I stayed
home while my wife shopped -- she
didn’t want me going sour on holiday
crowds and goal-unspecific shopping.
Thus I had the whole place to myself,
to read and write and doze and amble,
free inside myself without the
least encumbrance of an other. So much
for rowing toward the ineffible svelte She.
It was a savagely selfish opportunity
which around here is A: A rarity;
B: Evidence of what’s worst right
now between my wife and I;
and/or C: Exactly what an
alkie in or out of his cups needs
the very least. And where I’ve taken
these love-free days with great
pleasure in the past (very
wrong ones in the first half of our
marriage -- like drinking all afternoon
in some lousy local bar -- or
purposeful & sustaining ones
since, like reading Moby Dick
or assembling these verse excessives
into some more assembled form) --
where I’ve had my pleasures high
and low alone in the past, yesterday
I wanted none of it. I was home
alone and wanted out, I wanted
to be free of that Yale-turned-jail
again, for someone to knock on
my poor door of self and beg
me come out to play, to not feel
dutiful and dronish, old and inept
and unattractive, half and less
of all I once believed: I dunno,
all of that summed on a bad shore
yesterday that somehow I
got to exactly by my meanings,
as if this noisome cortical
howl was destined to crash
on silent shores beneath the
frozen stars. I moped, I puttered
and ate and napped, the day outside
soft and breezy-cool in the
ambience of death. Tried calling
my sponsor three times, read “The
Christmas Banquet” in a first edition
of Hawthorne’s Mosses
(thinking old purities soothe)
listening to Ravel’s “Gaspard de
Nuit.” Bored, I put on the video of my
last gig in 1986, watching myself
at 29 play in that final mess,
too tall, silly-haired, waving my
blue Hamer guitar around like the pro
I couldn’t be, hammering out heavy metal
riffs with those sugarpop yahoos
who just wanted relief from playing
in a 50’s band out at Disney all
day long. Everything I played looked
and sounded so fucked up until “Lonely
Town,” which was pure enough perfection
as my minor ways go, the only decent song
in the entire set we played that night
(lost amid a the death roaring of six
punk-rock bands) -- good, because we
had recorded it few weeks earlier. Three
worthy minutes of Aphroditean foam-
and-yearn, all I had in my pockets after
10 years of inept foolery. Oh well. I
turned off the tape and just sat there
quiet on the couch as afternoon halcyons
drifted breezy through the trees,
my life come to naught and perfect for so doing.
Well, as the Arkansas Traveller would say in
AA meetings,“Everybody gets da blues
sometimes.” His voice saying that in
memory -- low and cracker, juicing that
word “blues” as he said it -- proved comfort
enough as the hours wore on, that
and knowing that my wife was coming
home and that I would have it ready for her.
I vacuumed the house & cleaned the bathroom
& spent two hours cooking dinner, grilled
flat-iron steaks with potatoes gratinned in
heavy cream and goat’s cheese, green beans
blanched then sauteed with glazed shallots,
brown apple betty for dessert. There was a
I-A division football championship on the tube
(snow drifts just off the field, the warring
teams exhaling plumes of steam) as I worked,
the house across the street from our kitchen window
now decked in lights & glowing in the dark,
I imagined my wife driving out from the
mall-frenetics of the season & coming
home to this: My mood improved. Fed the cats
on the back porch, all of them greedy
for love’s food, butting up against my hands
and purring up a storm, tearing into
their bowls as I poured dry food out
& spooned wet food over, the three of them
getting at the simplest truths which
bind us to these difficult and strange islands
we call out hearts. Beyond the porch our
yard in winter looked parched and beaten,
the bushes ragged, the oaks at the back
border slowly, oh so slowly bending in the wind,
motions which their roots sustain, gripped down
into the black loam of that old and almost
lost religion, the one which made the wild
bourne which separates You and I a
door, and welcoming at that. This Christmas
we’re doing the very least, just what’s required,
mostly because we’re so broke, but also taking
satisfaction from our remove from things
we must do but cannot feel. Thus yesterday
was more solstitial than yuletidal, harrowed
in a pregnant emptiness which surrounds both
out and down with that vestigal future which
reaches further back, sighing oh so soft
and lost like a lonely shore in winter,
like the creaking of garden gate
that will not close or open.