Whale-Gut Lascaux

“For Deleuze and Guattari ((whose Anti Oediups (1972) states there is an inner fascism that structures sexuality and politics as well)), there is no structure, no boundary, no forms of idenity which is not a blockage of the flow of desire, a flow which they posit as the only and necessary alternative to inner fascism.

"Desire alone is revolutionary. It is not governed (contra Freud) by the Oedipal conflict and its subsequent repressions, nor (contra Lacan) by some even more primal lack.

"Desire is nomadic and universal, and 'does not take as its object things and persons, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therin breaks and captures"; it is only ‘through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in narrow cells of the type 'couple', 'family,' 'person,' 'objects.’”

-- James Berger, "Cultural trauma and the 'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland" (Postmodern Culture 5.3)



A growing poetics then would create then destroy the categories of its making: ever on the pursuit of a fresh perspective, a new woman, the next glimmer of possibility. Friction raises tension: the contained bursts forth in song and seed.

***

“The woman penetrated is a labyrinth. You emerge into another world inside the woman. The penis is the bridge; the passage to another world is coitus; the other world is a womb-cave. Cave man still drags cave woman into his cave; al coitus is fornication (fornix, an underground arched vault). And the cave in which coitus takes place is the grave; a cthonic fertility rite; Antigone buried alive, together with her ancestors, her bridal chamber the tomb. Death is coitus and coitus is death. Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, incesturous coitus.”

"... The head, the husband, and the soul of the body. The classic psychoanalytical equation, head=genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The was up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital...

"... In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of languate, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head.

--Norman O. Brown, Love's Body





MY WHALE-GUT LASCAUX

Dec. 23

Heavy spats of rain keep rolling
over the morning, unfreighting
Hel’s bilges on the trees and
roofs of our town. A drowning night.
Yet this is all the home I know
in my deepest bones.
The music of such wet sighing
repletes my dry ears with
the its low tones, harrowing
them with the sound of
Leviathan swimming overhead,
fanning up fresh rollers of wild
rain with his sea-clabbering
flukes. I’m here alone in the
belly of my song, O Lord, writing
these verses just to you, and
I don’t know if its with the steeliest
tongue of devotion or the flintiest
sickle of defiance that I write
on about the same old old things
in the same old chanson,
singsonging with the ardor of
drippy droll blue freeze.
What’s a singer without a tribe
or whose clan is long dead and
deep buried, too long unseen
by the light of real days?
Is this the poetry of poetry’s
own death, a wheezy geezer rattle
of old-frothed frenzies
geysered brittle on the page,
a dry soul’s sotto cunt canto
dressed up like mashing tides?
I’m just a fool in the saddle
of self-addled contretemps,
stubbornly clinging to a clanging
black bell’s overblued balls,
clabbering the same set
of wrong-headed devices
for so long that they
smack of a faith, a sotted poetics,
the leys of a dark myth?
Is that bliss enough
for the age and mine,
that smack of the lips
sufficient for the kiss
that never comes, for
the taste of delights
lost in lost nights?
First light will come soon enough,
erasing this sweet dripping dark
with a pale sigh, draining all
traces of ink from the page.
I’ve tossed a hundred
comp books like this one
into two boxes in the closet;
they’re all I have to show
for these duly daily
forays out on the blue of a
song’s womb-aching soak,
shouting salt matins to
a congregation of one.
A hundred cheap headstones
whose one meter is mired deep
in the silt of latenight aeries
which fell between the moon
and the sea. Give me enough
trope and I’ll hang myself
high in those drowned trees,
propounding the sound of lost gods
with my bones turning and
knocking in the blue that
song my real hand
couldn’t carve out except
the wrong way, across and
down the tree-ghosted page.
Daily I scythe myself at the hips,
spouting white nonsense
back to the wave I was
born in and reborn through,
celebrating the joy of
union even when there is
none to be found. It’s not
very noble, just all I can do,
a dirty white boy stuck
in the brine gut of Lascaux,
writing down and singing aloud
every song of the God who lives on
in the blue-swooned fabliaux
of an old maker’s halloo.