The Mysteries of Bliss XI: Pig Rot

"The link between sowing the grain and vanishing in the underworld is confirmed by a further correspondence of myth and cult. The Orphic variants of the mythologem relegated the events in the Homeric hymn to a very primitive setting. A swineherd comes in, with the name of Eubuleus (a name also of Hades); he is the witness of the rape, because his pigs were swallowed up by the earth along with Persephone. This story is borne out -- as the sources themselves show -- by the fact that young pigs were cast into pits in honour of the two goddesses. We learn this in connection with the Tesmophoria; but it would be clear enough in any case that an analogy existed between the cavalier treatment of pigs and the sowing of the grain.

The pig is Demeter’s sacrificial animal. In one connection, where it is dedicated to the Eleusinian mysteries, it is called ... the “uterine animal” of the earth, just as the dolphin was the “uterine animal” of the sea. It was customary for Demeter to receive a gravid sow as a sacrifcial offering. The mother animal is a fit offering to the Mother Goddess, the pig in the pit a fit offering to her vanished daughter. As symbols of the goddesses, pig and grain were perfect parallels. Even the decomposed bodies of the pigs were drawn into the cult: the noisome remains were fetched up again, put on the altar, and used to make the sowing more fruitful. If , then, the pig-and-grain parallel lays stress on corruption, it will no doubt remind us that the grain decays under the earth and thus, in the state of fruitful death, hints at the Kore dwelling in the realm of the dead.

So the Demeter idea is not lacking in the element of corruption coupled with the Kore’s subterranean abode. Seen in terms of the Persephone myth, the fruitful death of the grain, religiously emphasized by the particluars of the pig-sacrifice, acquires a symbolic value, just as it is used as a parable for another idea: ‘Verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground an die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ {John 12:24} The corn and the pig buried in earth and left to decay point to a mythological happening and, interpreted accordingly, become transparently clear and hallowed.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore”




I drank like a pig, snout in the bum
of the night’s malt excretes,
jolly, devout, routing in the
roots of my rot in a merry
blotto sot, blithe to the damage
I wreaked with every shot poured
from lips out through my hips.
I lived a third of my life,
straining to hurl every
drop of blue swirl from gullet to
hips into the marl of that votive
darkeyed girl who daughtered
my great ancient mother’s
dark uteral thrall. In AA they say
your story is your sobriety,
and I’m happy to report that
I’ve come back from the abyss
twice (by the grace of my God),
the prodigal pig full harrowed in
his filth, foresworn of swinish thirst,
at work now the other way, trying
to pour back into the world the
divinest blue I can name from
well-depths I now tend by not
falling into them one day at a time.
Now I read in the old ritual how
pigs were thrown into the hole
Kore was raped through
and left there to rot, only to
be interred at a further station
of the ritual and set on an
altar, in full flower of reek,
as evidence of how the lost
soul returns through the gates
of its death into spring’s flower,
hallowing those harrows with
a new crop of grain. So I dig
in my dirt and find that bum self
like a lord of swine night,
knocking back shots of schnapps
in moonlight as cold as his
heart, then gripping the asscheeks
of Ms. Wrong and snouting
her asshole in a delirium of
delight so wrong every split hoof
in hell starts high-fiving and
spitting into that rout
of the world, the king of hell
himself in my hips
swiving the dew billows of
Kore in his carriage
thundering under the world.
Licking that rear portal
through which all corruption
passes, fucking there too,
jamming every wrong-headedness
into the darkness of
hell’s coffined womb,
no matter how hard it hurts
the orizons of love. Awful.
And how hard he comes
there at the cape of worst
nights, in a bellowing shriek
of black-lit hurled seed,
blanketing dark regions
with the depths of his
need, ebbing to a grunt
wheeze and sigh & passing
out there, cock still in
the cornhole where death
siloes its vast winter’s store.
As long as I stayed there
the tale had to stay dark,
invisible, perforce blotted out
with the next night’s oblivion,
drifting down the dark tide.
But I surrendered at last,
sacrificing that pig, letting
deeper powers lift me
out of that corrupt mess,
wakening the man from the boy,
budding the sower, the
husbandman, the reaper
and greenman
whose wife is the life
of the womb no booze
can reach. That man in his
cups down in the dirt of my
past is sacred to her, the
essential lost third of the
mystery meant to stay dark,
the corrupt, broken visage
of guilt which dies to give
life to the tribe. It keeps me
humble, knowing how far one
can fall, wanting the worst
of it all, very dip dram and
clench in the foresakens of hell.
It makes one desire to make
of that tomb a womb of great
usefulness to the next
wearing traveller who
beaches the mess in surrender.
In AA we laugh at the horrors
of our tale because they
belong now to our past,
part of that rude bucolic,
that comedy of errors down the
bottom of a glass which led to
the door which opened
strangely to the beginning
of a real, serene, purposeful
yet humble adult life.
And to think - all we had to do was
die enough down there.
So too this writing, interring
the walls of that tale lost long
ago when Eleusis fell into ruin.
Gone but not forgotten, not
in the soul’s code which still
semaphores like a buoy in
the inarticulate swamps
of our civilized night. I read
of the mysteries and write
my own down alongside them,
seeking to spark a leap
which jumps both ways at once,
igniting in history and mystery
a walk through the dark
giving birth to the mark I
was born with -- a heart
fixed by the arrow it aches
for, the sear of the Yes which soars
where it scores, rooting me
here on this grave-marking
chair. I’m riding the end
of this poem like a dolphin
in the dirt of its sea,
carousing the panties
left in Hades' aged coach --
how lacy and supple
they lay on my face,
their criminal center
still fragrant against my nose,
perfumed with springtime
and oceanic desire
and riot of all that
it ruined -- its something
this snout offers back
today as a penultimate
if not quintessential
of bliss: The riotous
cry of the rebottled booze,
that sourmash trout
I ride in hell’s rout
singing the praises
of rot’s sweet devout,
that in such low offalish
orizons, such whale-shit
chansonings, I salt new
horizons in all that
I tossed there
awakening here.


THIS COMPOST

Walt Whitman

1.

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceived,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and
turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2.

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow,
the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea
which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves
in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard,
that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises
out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions
of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.


***

from “GARBAGE”

A.R. Ammons

garbage has to be the poem of our time because
—- garbage is spiritual, believable enough

to get our attention, getting in the way, piling up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and

creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation

to trashlessness, that is too Or off, and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic: I’m a

hole puncher or hole plugger: stick a finger
in the dame (&m, damn, dike), hold back the issue

of creativity’s flood, the forthcoming, futuristic,
the origins feeding trash: down by I-95 in

Florida where flatland’s ocean- and gulf-flat,
mounds of disposal rise (for if you dug

something up to make room for something to put
in, what about the something dug up, as with graves:)

the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance,
as if up ziggurats toward the high places gulls

and garbage keep alive, offerings to the gods
of garbage, of retribution, of realistic

expectation, the deities of unpleasant necessities:
refined, young earthworms,

drowned up in macadam pools by spring rains,
moisten out white in a day or so and, round spots,

look like sputum or creamv-rich, broken-up cold
clams: if this is not the best poem of the

century, can it be about the worst poem of the
centurv: it comes, at least, toward the end,

so a long tracing of bad stuff can swell
under its measure: but there on the heights

a small smoke wafts the sacrificial bounty
day and night to layer the sky brown, shut us

in as into a lidded kettle, the everlasting
flame these acres-deep of tendance keep: a

tree offering of a crippled plastic chair:
a played-out sports outfit: a hill-myna

print stained with jelly: how to write this
poem, should it be short, a small popping of

duplexes, or long, hunting wide, coming home
late, losing the trail and recovering it:

should it act itself out, illustrations,
examples, colors, clothes or intensify

reductively into statement, bones any corpus
would do to surround, or should it be nothing

at all unless it finds itself: the poem,
which is about the pre-socratic idea of the

dispositional axis from stone to wind, wind
to stone (with my elaborations, if any)

is complete before it begins, so I needn’t
myself hurry into brevity, though a weary reader

might briefly be done: the axis will be clear
enough daubed here and there with a little ink

or fined out into every shade and form of its
L,./ revelation: this is a scientific poem,

Asserting that nature models values, that we
have invented little (copied), reflections of

possibilities already here, this where we came
to and how we came: a priestly director behind the

black-chufffing dozer leans the gleanings and
reads the birds, millions of loners circling

a common height, alighting to the meaty streaks
and puffy muffins (pufffins?): there is a mound,

too, in the poet’s mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and

shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strengthened by what it strengthens: for

where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption:
as where but brought low, where

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

where but in the arrangements love crawls us through,
not a thing left in our self-display

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes: but we are natural: nature, not

we, gave rise to us: we are not, though, though natural,
divorced from higher, finer configurations:

tissues and holograms of energy circulate in
us and seek and find representations of themselves

outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling

and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these our wet cells,

right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of

the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and energy
loses all means to express itself except

as spirit, there, oh, yes, in the abiding where
mind but nothing else abides, the eternal,

until it turns into another pear or sunfish, that
momentary glint in the fisheye having

been there so long, coming and going, it’s
eternity’s glint: it all wraps back round,

into and out of form, palpable and impalpable,
and in one phase, the one of grief and love,

we know the other, where everlastingness comes
to sway, okay and smooth: the heaven we mostly

want, though, is this jet-hoveled hell back,
heaven’s daunting asshole: one must write and

rewrite till one writes it right: if I’m in
touch, she said, then I’ve got an edge: what

the hell kind of talk is that: I can’t believe
I’m merely an old person: whose mother is dead,

whose father is gone and many of whose
friends and associates have wended away to the

ground, which is only heavy wind, or to ashes,
a lighter breeze: but it was all quite frankly

to be expected and not looked forward to: even
old trees, I remember some of them, where they

used to stand: pictures taken by some of them:
and old dogs, specially one imperial black one,

quad dogs with their hierarchies (another archie)
one succeeding another, the barking and romping

sliding away like slides from a projector: what
were they then that are what they are not: