Mysteries of Bliss VI: Theorems and Proofs

“The sixth century BC was a period of remarkable religious ferment when the ordinary individual, who enjoyed no gentile privilege was become more and more concerned about the after-life. The Isles of the Blessed were reserved for heroes and those favored by the gods, or what usually amounted to the same thing, by birth, for Homer had no care for the common man’s soul. The initiation ceremony at Eleusis, impressive and satisfying by its own nature, seemed to proffer some real hope, and for those who returned death had apparently lost much of its terror. It seems strange, of course, that a belief in future immortality could grow out of a humble ritual connected with a fertile patch of land, or one long-forgotten palace ceremony involving, as in the case of Athena and Erecthoneus, a goddess and a king. Yet so it was, and although the details of the mysteries have remained a secret, some general notions may be gleaned about them from the reports of witnesses in various ages.”

- John Pollard, “The Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Seers, Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution of the Sixth Century BC

***

Fear of death, of its shadowy girth
which made entering its door so chill-
Tartarean, shorn of one’s beloved bones,
with no tongue to savor sweetness
or belt the all-night blues, no sex
to stir ambrosial reveries of coming home again -- horrible. Or so we think. Neuropsychiatrists
are learning how behavior acts like a
swizzle stick in the brain, mixing up
elixirs of desired mood: Young women
gush and talk for the oxytocin which
such intimate details released. Such
love is their drug and they can’t get
enough of it -- think soaps, Harlequin
romances, the Lifetime channel,
HSN’s 24-hour girlfriend babble
on shoes and creams and faux jewels.
Their talk weaves the nest: It makes
good biological sense, to paint the ears
of maids with the echo of distant wedding
bells, attuning every other sense toward
that fragrant ideal. (Know what
the most popular scent is among
women? Baby powder.) For
guys, well, it seems we can’t stop
babbling on about sex: What
is it that such clabbering of the tongue
tolls in the brain? Perhaps the feeling
of sanction against death? An intimacy
with the ever-burning light which shines
behind a woman’s smile ... Do men jones
conversing with dreamt pussy,
as if thus stirring their penises
round and down back to a woman
which makes a spirit right,
invulnerable against decrepitude
and age? Does the sexual lubricant
loosed by some psychoenzime
serve as immortal baste, where no
man ages but cavorts the beach
where love’s endless first encounters
singing tra la la? Apollo and Zeus
and Hermes and Heracles were
all such ever-first children, and
their libidos bear them out, weaning
our imaginations on the starry
couplings of their fate; perhaps the
starkest child of them all on that
beach is Hades, lord of the darkest
third of world, who looked on Kore
playing in that springtime field and
was stricken to his core, his dreadful
realm poised so perfectly against
her naive naiad sport that the two
were halves heart, black-hooved lust
and blue-eyed innocence, looping
one circuit in the human brain with
something close to fate or zeitgeist
or gnosis. We each must go crazy in
that loop to sustain our species story,
but women and men go through the
other way from each other.
A maiden ages into the maid when she
gives birth, she ages further as she rears
her young, suffering all her mother did
when a dark man appeared at the
door & stole her away, carrying her off
to fates beyond the nest, above and beneath
the grave. Such toil further ages her into
the crone, that keeper of the Mysteries
whose hooded visage and exposed vulva
crowned medieval doors and portals,
a sheilanagig fertile now for death’s chill
seed, nesting in the grave’s own womb.
Through all the stations of her
purgatory, a woman tends to life,
her arc parallel to it, its boon companion
til death takes her for his queen.
For men there is no this to that:
it’s always sex and death; each
stroke’s the same no matter which
orifice he plunges or even whose,
the more the merrier. Each union
thimbles out a sea that he keeps
trying to measure, outnumbering his
death. It makes good biological sense,
sowing lifelong seed as far as wide as myths
can scatter, giving life its surest
chance to root and flourish in every
any nook. All those rapturous nights
I raptored, whiskey glass in one hand,
lassie’s ass just beyond the other --
I was conjuring that old sufficient man
of tundra hunt and quest, heading out
the door to night as if into the portal
of my grandpa’s story, for a mood
of godlike ache and glory, defeating
death with a self-same brood imbued
with all my genes. And though those
nights are long gone the reveries
persist, as I have found that ghosts
are lucent where the sun’s just hot,
the inside funk and slosh of memory
the full metal jacket of what I’ll
always thrust and ejaculate
acting out the man without
terrorizing the world. If anything
I get closer to him renouncing
glut for gleam. Writing at this hour
is best because it’s been a while
since my last meal -- evolutionary
scientists now say that hunger
mothers craft, our innovations
hammered out on the anvil
of an empty gut, devising stone axes
& spears & tactics for the hunt
and protecting its rude borders,
prolonging kills with salt and fire.
Thus I’m here at 4 a.m., the early
early bird out to catch the worm
before the committee of the waking
world tries to snatch it from my reach.
My hand across the page in rhythms
not unlike my penis in love’s furnace,
rapt that rape of that wild door which
made me man and woman: I write
to initiate again those mysteries
whose doors swing two ways at once
-- out and in, forward and back, up
and down, to Thee and She
both back from the Sidhe to
surface or sound in me again.
Researchers now say that our
future survival in this tool-mad
age depends upon psyches which
refuse to age, staying fresh & young
& devious to the needs of the next
day’s hunt. In psychic neotony
age is declared a trick of time and
the magic water that it wells
bids us stay forever young, granting
gross permission to head out
again and again ready to find
the next wife for life, if only
(or perhaps especially) for a one
night’s noctal thrash of jazz and
gin and jism (shouting Yes
cocktails the same), baptising
in eternal plenty here and now,
forever and amen.
It keeps me filling pages, though
I wonder what of the missing father
who ghosts the whole affair;
there is a troubling resonance between
all starry lines which undertows
the young fool’s ways which learn
so fast but cannot know, who sows
but fails to reap. That father is the boy
who ended with a sigh inside a nuptial
clench, foregoing his wide forays
for the deeper one, siloed down
a wedding ring’s gold mound. That
father’s ghost makes much of our
culture’s iron rounds sound hollow
when struck against true making’s anvil:
we’re addicted to woozy dreams of
floozy youth’s immortal-seeming dew;
we’ve hammered out in our hunger
for that flesh vast replicas of youth
-- botox, boobjobs, Viagra, anti-aging
hormones and creams, tribal tats,
60’s rocknroll bands strutting
on the stage in their 60’s. (Some kid
drove one of those Ninja motorcycles
150 miles per hour into that back
of an SUV the other day, bulleting
his corpse into the rear storage unit.)
The danger of all this is clear, for
what once made sense to a threatened
species of amillion years ago is
a far different thing when that species
now rules the world with an almost
misogynistic contempt of earth-wide
mother. We’ll live forever till we kill
the world, exulting Free At Last
to our salt’s disaster. We must grow up
somehow, retool that ancient father so he’s
working here again, hand in hand with
that cunning boy, in marriage to what
the inner woman really needs,
sufficing the tribe with stable fructive
motions. Let’s pair Kore and Hades
at the banquet table we share with worms,
let’s scythe her harvest moon with
the full cycle of our sickleticklepickle.
The old Mysteries didn’t make Greek
culture immortal in any real way
but they calmed it down somehow, humanized
the whole deific mess, right-sized them
for true passage into the aegis which still
shines in their sixth century BC.
They built a cathedral of that peek
into the Mother’s womb, to slake
eternal hunger, pairing a maid’s
fancy to the tall dark handsome one’s
plural fiery phalloi. Today I view that
door I hurried through long ago in lust
of finding love again as a woman’s
revealed rear view where holies
gape and wink, like a temple entrance,
like a cave’s dark door, the view
which suffices to make suns rise again?
Just to think of roses petalled
in such obscenely sublime poses
is enough to baste my brain with these
virile hecatombs, the horses of
that black chariot I fear to ride
but must. I write, I ride, straight
through that gate of mythic ecstasies,
that I may end one song at last and seed
the next to come, perhaps tomorrow,
maybe on this page, or some other
womblike wave’s long crash and hiss
which tides that door I rushed on through
seeking out the mysteries of bliss.