Pluto's Teller

There is a whole series of Greek coins showing a dolphin carrying a boy or youth on its back. Eros is another such boyish figure, (a) winged child ... Then we have Phalanthos and Taras, the last-named being the legendary founder and name-giver of the city of Tarentum. The boy riding on a dolphin often wears a flower in his hair, and this seems to indicate a creature midway between fish and bud. Another numismatic figure approximates very closely in type--though without being dependent on it -- to the Indian picture of a child asleep on a sea-mount, and this is Palaimon, alias Melikertes, lying dead or asleep on a dolphin, a child god who deserves special study from our point of view. There are Greek legends, translations of the mythological theme into purely human language, which tell how dolphins rescued their mortal favourites or carried the dead safely to shore. But the names of those favoured of the dolphins are unmistakably mythological, such as Koiranos (“Master”), or Enhalos (“he of the sea”). The story of Arion the Singer, who was rescued from the clutches of pirates by a dolphin, is the best-known example of these legends, proving at the same time that we are in the sphere of influence of Apollo, the lord-protector of poets. The second part of the Homeric hymn to Apollo, held by many to be a second hymn on its own, relates the epiphany of Apollo Delphinios. In the form of a dolphin the god conducts his first priests to Krisa, the bay on which his shrine has just been founded. His epiphany is an epiphany on a ship: this delphiform Apollo makes a place for himself on the ship of his future priests--a proof here ... (that) “fish” and “ship” are equivalent mythical images. As variants of the same theme they mean the same when combined in one.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “The Primordial Child in Primordial Times”

CROWN OF LIR

He is forever young astride
that sleek so wild blue dolphin,
zyeehawing over the foaming
waves or dead asleep -- enwombed
still in first bliss -- or perhaps
even dead, ferried homeward
on Thalassa's hearse. In all
the flower tucked behind
his ear bespeaks a listening
which trumpets back in
the antiphons of full bloom,
hurling such perfume
that the entire sea swoons
enrapt, sending curve
after curve his way
to plunge and riot
and plow under to
the source where all
life begins. No wonder
he appeared on so many
ancient coins -- the poster
boy for fortune's pluck,
the gilded lucre through
which old men get
maids to fuck,
a way to duck death's
swash by minting back
the eyes with youth.
Always a sea and shore
between his romp,
as he and fish are
merged in the marge
of tidal marches which
pulse a God's blue
augments as they crash
and ebb the heart:
Always a fish-tail for
ship's rudder, a song
for wet travail, a course
both known and
abyssal toward ends
both gold and bone.
And though the visage
of this tale is young
-- both boy and fish
careen in puppy glee --
it masks a far far
older man's dark face,
that brooder
of the first horrific
sea, bull-ravager of
Europa, the wolfish
sharps and flats of
Apollo's golden lyre
keyed from Hypoborean
depths. That old man is
Uranos, cleft of his
huge balls, dreaming
Aphrodite from the
froth of that first wound:
He's the ghost of the
singer Arion, doomed to sing
to a court of whale-
and ship-ribs
two hundred leagues
below the wake he
was ditched by pirates in,
singing of rescue
to dry shores by the
dolphin not found
outside of songs:
He is Poseidon
inside his stallion
hooves which you
hear bestride the waves'
stampede to shore, a
thunder which grows
loud the more both sea
and land agree to share the
augments of a strand's
so liquid rocky roar.
Behind or under that
puerile sweet of song's first
crash and plunge
wakes first man of the sea,
a giant walking just beneath
the boy we care to see.
The boy astride the dolphin
crests so much that's far
under me, ruddering his
courses in this hand which
writes his emblem down.



The Manx word for giant is foawr, in which a vowel-flanked "m" has been spirited away, as shown by the mordern Irish spelling, fomharsubmarini but no more are they invariably connected with the sea. So another etymoloygy recommmends itself, one which comes from Dr. Whitley Stokes, and makes the morin fomori to be of the same origin as the mare in the English nightmare ...

- John Rhys, "Celtic Folklore"

So I wonder if the dolphin-rider emblem on the my father's family crest to that of a naked giant riding on the back of a whale, or Manannan astride his grey horse "Wave Sweeper" ...


THE DOLPHIN RIDER

1993

All the world's a whisper,
Where ocean margins cry,
I ride my fevered fishes there
Between the breakers and the sky.

Cities lie beneath the flood,
The sun king sleeps below.
But I croon darkly in your blood,
With brine and brawl and brogue.

A woman waits for you on a shore
No course you chart can reach.
Only storms can take you there
To wreck you on her beach.

I am the Dylan of your fathers,
Galloping the nine-wave brute,
I call you from your harbor, boy,
Into the darkness of all truth.

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.



"You are growing wiser than I am," ((Emily Dickinson wrote to Abiah Root in late 1850)), "and nipping in the bud fancies I let blossom." Leaving Abiah to hug the shore, Emily chose "to buffet the sea-I can count the bitter wrecks in these pleasant waters, anda hear the murmuring of the winds, but Oh I love the danger!"

- Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, 250


EROS

2000

Eros, the god of love, emerged
to create the earth. Before, all
was silent, bare, and motionless.
Now all was life, joy, and motion.
-- Early Greek Myth

That passionate music: How it flings
us, joyous, toward her sweet body
and beyond. Til death do we fall.
Why is it that the thought of
the ripened curves of her breasts
and lutelike bottom grips me like
a paradigm? My lust is like
a burning fiddle in a field of split corn.
Desire though is something different.
A heedless integer halving itself in another.
Eros reaching like Orpheus
for the eternally dead bride.
A music which goes under
to rise in one wave
like a breath inside stone.
A man riding a dolphin toward
the next glittery wave.
A trope of Thalassa, inside,
dark, and free. Strangeness forever
ripening at the first tentative
shock of what so gorgeously
and fatally blooms.


CUCULATTUS OF SPRING

2001

A cuculattus of spring
is in this day's color,
a blue-green ache
rising in spray ...
Yet still there is
much that is night
and misery, the dolor
of winter's long
vacancy, cold
and starving
memories of
my ex wife in
an ex house with
ex cats. No way
forward from
that dark cell
that doesn't lead
back again. My
poems all brittle
and first draft,
no epiphanies
unmuddied
by the guilt
of their gleam:

But oh how
the dolphin
breeched the
sea last night
when Jeanette
pulled off her gown
to dance full glory
for me,
tall and blonde,
breasts like fake
grapefruit o'erswollen
on the bough
& her eyes
an icy blue
adrift in the
beyonds (back
yard, beach
strand, watery grave).

I said thank you
and paid up then
watched her swim
on to the next bone
dowsing for what
poises as truth these
days. Left her there
til I was in the
dark of my bed,
harness to great
fish, getting
her where I could
name her sleep.
Blonde hair falling
across the back end
of a history going blue
to black
and now blue
green in this vernal
rise which I suspect
may never bloom.
Planes descending
one by one with
their freight of
rubes, that low
hum steady
in the day like
a rash or a wash of
diesel oil. Reminding
us how far
there is to travel
in our own skins,
o cuculattus,
oh miserable sheen
of this raw spring.


DOLPHIN RIDER

2000

He is both meat
and motion of
my darkest
pure joys,
a figure carving
one wave
with his weight
then leaping
over the next
in a shower
of full-mooned
spray. It doesn't
matter what I
say here, how
I praise or damn
him: He just
rides that
bigass fish
on and on,
every night
and nightside
of my life singing
those big
brassy songs.
He's my
totem curse,
an archetype of
ruin which has
hammered every
swingin' dick
in my clan.
Like my
great great
grandfather
O'Riley who
burned his fiddle
to atone
for all the
drunk fiddling
haystack-fucking
the fish god
demanded of
him. The last
time my father
saw him he
was 72
and in hot
shit for offering
the neighbor
lady a quarter
for a toss.
The music
never ends:
tail and tooth
and cock
and voice are
all flames of
an eloquent fire
born on God's
abyssal plains,
awful or
awesome
depending on how
you survive
that music.
Today I say
he rides to
protect and
border and greet
us just beyond
whatever solace
we call harbor.
Singing is just
surrender you know
to what rises
and burns
as much as
to the dark waters
you carry.
A white flag
for dolphins
at midnight.
Your voice alone
singing her name.




HERALDRY

Nov. 2004

In the story of my father's
name (a bastard relic
now at best) there are
harpists in our history
who entertained the
Norman kings in the
south of Ireland: And
when those kings and
their courts washed
back into the Irish
sea, their minstrelsy
wandered forth, seeking
patronage in whatever
semblance of a court
that sad country
could provide. A
family singer of the
17th century lamented,
"who will buy a poem?"
and concluded, "I'm
a ship with a ruined
cargo/now the famous
Fitzgeralds are gone./
No answer. A terrible case./
It is all in vain that I ask."
Perhaps that's why
one of ours boarded
the Sea Sprite in
1779, carrying that
music to Boston Harbor.
But when were your
songs ever safe, praising
the rise of kings who
always fell, revelling
in love's wild delights
beyond the pale of
papal decree and
the prying eyes of
royal husbands? Such
blasphemy and scandal
have always pleased you
well, even if your
mortal lovers all found
sorrow at the far ends
of their verses. No matter.
All those years I wandered
and blundered learning
how not to drink from
those three cups of song
which festoon my father's
crest: a delight only to
you. Certainly not for
my mortal loves; nor
even much in my
long education in
singing mortal songs about love.
The rise and fall of
every wave to you
is holy and florid,
no matter how wet
and scraggly my
leaps become in them.
That naked man
astride the mean-
looking dolphin atop
the crest - he's not
giving up the song.
That's plain from
the motto - Not by
Providence but Victory! -
which is written under
wall like a labia
buzzing a Bronx cheer
to every noble aim
and their chaste remains.
You love this sweet
cacophony of lost
and lonely songs
forever hitting shores
you've just left behind.
Whatever I set to paper
here was lifted from
that sweet air
drifting in from
the absence you hurl,
like perfume, everywhere
you've been: A high
strange music which
my lyrics dare complete
or at least ferry to
the next wild shore
flapping in the breeze
like your dress
just out of sight.
Libraries and chapels
and writing chairs
are just our way
of trying to master you,
as men build dams
and bulwarks against
the sea. But the music
like a tide is crashing
down the shore
where you are close,
oh, closer than the
margin of a kiss.
You have made of me
a brine-soaked harp
which sings of you
everywhere there's
moonlight on the strings
and blue dazzle in the springs.




ST. BRENDAN AND THE BIG SKULL

Brendan and his monks find the head of a dead man by the seashore. The head is very large, its forehead measuring five feet across. At Brendan’s request, the giant tells him that he was a heathen, who for his own profit waded through the sea. He was big and strong, and stood a hundred feet tall. He waylaid sailors and took their goods. For all his outsize proportions he was drowned in a flood. Brendan offers to resucitate and baptize him, so as to give him the possibility of obtaining remission for his sins and afterwards going to paradise. The giant refuses because he is afraid he will not be able to resist the temptation of sin. This would be worse, for, as he says, baptized souls are tormented much worse in hell than heathens are. Besides, he has a terrible fear of dying once again. He wants to go back to his torments in the darkness. He takes his leave, with Brendan’s good wishes. Brendan departs in his ship.

— from Clara Strijbosch, “The Heathen Giant in The Voyage of St. Brendan”

BETWEEN

2004

Only what is actually loved
and known can be seen
sub specie aeternitati.

— David Jones

My giant straddles ages
firmaments & dolors.
Between is his one stance,
of well and shore
composed. Compress
in the poem
this Friday morning
and his uncertain
seward gaze.
Both the migraine-
weary stale-coffee-
taste of 5 a.m.
and a tidal angelus
of a vast enacting sleep.
Both the cat in the
window shaped
like a bell or floret
against the cold
dark morning
and the ache in his
balls to hurl
hammers and hooves
on the highest rollers
of salt verse.
Both the missals
no one has seen
for a thousand
years breaking
open in my mind
like fresh bread
and the drawl of
our President telling us
what we want to
hear in that spit-shine
that walks right over
just about everyone.
Both my wife asleep
upstairs beneath
a heavy duvet with
those warm naked
legs I desperately
need to wrap round
these glottals
and the pale wanton
throned under, who
milks my longing
with verbs & verities
& the dark blue velvet
lining of whatever.
It takes a big man
to make tillage of
between, to shire
that shore half-seen,
half-dreamed. To know
I’ll never know more
than this gait instructs.
He seeds these
shorelike ambles
with a welling bliss.
His old steps echo
my next near-miss.
Between my rages,
master, in your blue fork.

BERMANUS

2004

Bermanus, or Borvo, was a deity
who presided over seething,
turbulent waters, especially hot
springs. A ceramic image from
Vichy shows him attended by a
horned serpent and a dolphin.
His indwelling well-goddess was
Damona (or Burmana). As in the
case of Diano Abnoba, Bumanus
was identified with a larger
sacred forest area, the Lucus
Burmani, around Cervo in Liguria.

- Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

Addiction took me deep into
a forest of night naughtiness.
Days were fired by the energy
of those spent secrets, and had
the zeal and mania of a boy-man
with too much to hide, night music
welling and bleeding from every
purposeful seam. Lousy way to live
but I had to, for reasons known
to God: In every arc of drink to mouth
was the complicit desire which
turned every itch to a rabid south,
attempting egress of a magic shire
known in the parley of the season
as Good Times. Years I tossed
down that black well now resurface
here, gleaming silvery and blue,
distilled into an older man's abandonment
to the verbal way the dark sings.
That wild wood I once ravened
was too alien to be called my heart
- I the eternally early riser plying
the dead a.m.s between midnight
and three - yet that wild is
tethered here, reconnoitered,
compassed in every bad way
the errant knight of booze
in his quest descends. That
harrowed hell lies close to this
hour like a lost or buried shrine
to the god of hot bubbly springs
who lorded over the forest
with every well-surge released.
He's in this one pale hand
which rides across the page
beneath the only lamp stirred
to this hour-too early for most,
too late in all the bottle clubs
when most wallets bottles
and last-gasp enterprise are spent.
At this loneliest and most savage
hour of my past I write, each
page torn from the heart of a
sacred dark wilderness, fresh,
still beating, still bare as a
jackal's greedy tooth. I recall
a night in the winter of '86
when I steered a too-drunk
wealthy Winter Park girl
from the Crocodile Club
into the jaws of my torn
and stained bed, working down
her bright white pants
while she snored face-down.
Some of that white calcination
of pant and panty and flabby
asscheeks which I spread
and furrowed is here in this
white crannog just above
a black and cold and ancient
tide - in the towel I drape
over one arm to ward off
coffee-spills, in the writing desk
in my lap, in this spread
of pages with its dark blue
seam which calls me still
to all between desire and
its dark-hooved mordents,
the marauding futile jaunt.
This crannog was mortgaged
by all those horrid years
of one bad long carouse,
each night a black tree
felled and sawed and hammered
into this shrine atop so
much below. All that passed
so I can sit here and
observe the night without
the empty glasses. I paid
for this residence with
a greedy coin, vaulted in
a hundred pale white loins:
And the motion which kept
all concealed now hauls
me from shore to shore,
down wells and on to
crannogs - at least upon
this page. In the alchemy
of nights this one still lolls
the tongue of the fire-lizard
who crawled through all
that darkness to make
an apt home here. O Lord,
keep my glottals smoking,
and fill my pen with
blackwash of gin
and blue-finned aqua,
wild shorage for that satyr
You still see to ferry in.



SUN AND SEA

2004

The sun rolled westward
in its golden car
where it met then mated
the great sea's coilage,
their child this ire
of new and old blue fire.
The poet I know works
well at this depth,
surrounded by the sea's
submergings at this
deep station before dawn,
light over my shoulder,
books sprawled in my lap,
eyes wide open
to the fins which rise
and winnow by.
This poem wings
best below the bower
of its parentage, singing
of that dazzling soak
which wombs the next
great day. Wheels of
that car turning slow but
inside wifely blue
sighs, furrowing the
marge which shouts
in birthing exultation
the firmament of sky
with its huge hoary sun
astride a dolphin's back.
What more need I say?
Two cultures wooed and
won the whale roads
of this swiving heart:
one emerges here singing
astride a blue shining cart.

Bone Song

Is this diving in verbal brine an attempt to regain primary speech, the argot of angels, words for the insides of words? What sort of nakedness is necessary to marrow such a wind? This from Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 62:

***

The shamans whom Rasmussen interrogated about {the spiritual exercise of seeing one’s own skeleton} gave rather vague answers which the famous explorer sumarizes as follows: “Though no shaman can explain to himself how and why, he can, by the power his brain derives from the supernatural, as it were by thought alone, divest his body of its flesh and blood, so that nothing remains but his bones. And he must then name all the parts of his body, mentioning every single bone by name; and in so doing, he must not use ordinary human speech, but only the special and sacred shaman’s language which he has learned from his instructor. By thus seeing himself naked, altogether freed from the perishable and transient flesh and blood, he consecrates himself, in the sacred tongue of the shamans, to his great task, through that part of his body which will longest withstand the action of the sun, wind, and weather, after he is dead.




BONE SONG

Jan. 5, 2006

This is the darkest song
in the pot, the one which
you have to get through
all the others to sing
through naked bones.
All the world’s oceans
are a drop to its pour
and its breasts swell
just short of its blue nipple.
The one who taught
this song to me came
from the sea on a night
in a dream of the knife
which cut these bones
free of aging gore,
harvesting a whale’s voice
from my pain. My
teacher surged from
the sea’s boneless ire
demanding my skeleton
entire; thus my words
are flapping and loose
on the shores of the
common brogue, of
no use anywhere but
here. Pure vowels round
the place where a skull
once rooted, lost or
tossed to the bottom
of the sea. This song
was ferried from that
dark man’s balls from
orca and sea-elephant
and polar bear, singing
in claws and teeth
so keen the vast polar night
burned with appetite and
desire, aching more pure and
infernal than a man can say
though the words in bone
matters are water enough.
No one can measure this
song’s deeper reaches,
nor survive for long in its
night, unless he first
stroll his bones on the
coldest beach of all,
lucent as a crescent
moon wrinkling the tide,
gleaming with sea-salt and
the glaze of all every
womb he’s harrowed.
The song is a skeleton
walking the lines
which proceed from
the end of all other
songs, calm and creaking
in the hushed polar
night, walking that
permafrost mile
of beach at the
back of my mouth.

Ahab's Creel

I account no living bone of mine
one jot more me, than this dead one
that’s lost.

-- Ahab, Moby Dick

I went after God’s white acre
in the full lust of my youth
and returned with less than half,
one leg mine, the other
in his creel at the bottom
of the sea. Not content
in outmanning me on
the yeasty wave,
he returned one night
to unman me right on land
when I was lurching
home in drunken stupor:
the ground beneath
me turned to water
and I fell, causing
the first peg leg to shatter
and shear me through
the groin. In the months
of red torment that followed
soul and wound fused
in one infernal ache
to barb that beast but good,
mounting that wilderness
like a groom to plunge
cruel steel again and again
into its milky flesh
til with a sigh that beast
remit my sheared leg
with a spume of black
heart blood. I am hotter
now in blasted age
than every hour of my youth,
turning on a spit of singleness
too dangerous for saner men.
My compass is witched
by polar holes of ache
and doom hot and colder than
the sea; there’s only one course
across the salt chaos of blue,
one fish to find amid the proffered
millions. Only Dick will do
and no lubber’s God is deep or wild
enough to properly name him,
much less refrain my blackened
quest for quell the high rage
of my lust inside his damned breast.
I’ll find that mountain phallus
of abysms and stab him dead
then mount him like a ship
whose captain has been creeled
-- well, that’s how low wounds go.
What was mown from me
I’ll sickle back: that body
that once fell onto me is my
collapsing repast, my diving
greed to font berserker
seed. I’ll catch him, by all Gods
cursed, or he’ll catch me
as sure as wounds are bone rudders
of the whitest most deadly ecstasy.

Sea-birth, He-girth, & Cabbages too

Jan 1, 5:30 a.m.

In the tides of life, in action’s storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at Time’s humming loom it is my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

-- spirit invoked by Faust, I.500-9

***


An absolutely still and hushed dark hour, despite the occasional car lurching homeward up Ninth Avenue: drained to nothing from the prior night’s midnight zenith, so many champagne bottles harrowed to their effervescent depths. We bedded down at an early hour, my wife passing out from PM sinus pills, another of the week’s dastardly headaches (we’ve both suffered ‘em, blaming aerial hammers of high pressure, fronts moving over and receding and hauling back, stalling over us, some days cool, others, like yesterday, wan, sunny, getting into the mid-seventies). Around 9:30 p.m. I lay in bed next to my wife already deeply sleep, our cat settling into the corral between my legs, a window open to random arpeggios of distant firecrackers and bass-thumping car radios, hoots, cackles of celebration around this small town: Nothing in our neighborhood but everywhere on the marge. I figured it would be a long night, there’s a house down the way that gets pretty drunk late at night, and the folks across the street sounded like they were headed out for a good roust (what fun that must have been, to hear the way the couple sniped at each other on their porch yesterday afternoon). It was a vigil I decided to be grateful for, to pray for those descending down the abysms of booze I had fallen twice down the depths of, to keep my memories green with the sounds of that night, safe in a marriage bed I should surely have lost. So I lay there in the dark, half asleep, half listening to that rising party tide, slowly drifting off with the expectation I would be wakened by some carousal or other nearby, dreaming of my sponsee in a heavy fur coat talking to a pretty woman at a department store or my old job at the newspaper, calling me as I passed by to say how wonderfully he’s doing, all of the alarm bells going off in my head ... and then it was 3:30 a.m., wow, already here, and I stumbled downstairs to give Violet her treats and climb back in bed in the guest room as I usually do when I wake too early, (that bed much more comfortable to me), and absorbed the chill dark hush, the absolute entropy of party-cranked merriment into stillness, the old year’s spilled water and exhausted sleep, new year delivered, sleeping soundly at the breast ...

***

“The primal water,” writes Carl Kerenyi in “The Primordial Child in primordial times, “conceived as the womb, the breast of the mother, and the cradle, is a genuinely mythological image, a pictorial unit packed with meaning and brooking no further analysis. It crops up ... with especially clarity in the so-called theological discussion at the Court of the Sassanides ((in Iliad XIV 246, 302)). There it is said of the mother who was pregnant with the child-god, of Hera-Pege-Myria, that she carried in her womb, as in a sea, a ship freighting a thousandfold. ‘She has but onefish’, it is added -- the same that is also called her ship.” (in Kerenyi and Jung, Essays On A Science of Mythology, 46)

I read that passage in the hard silent soak of this newborn year and recalled a tradition that was related by the Puerto Rican boyfriend of my stepdaughter back in the early ‘90s; he said that as a boy they would stay up to midnight on New Year’s eve and then spill a bucket of water down the stairs, beating wildly on pots and pans in celebration. His father was dying of lung cancer, so he and his brother were soon to become orphans (the mother dying of AIDS some years before); and the whole context of that story was from the latter dying years of my first marriage, a time I don’t think much about in my writing, formational though they were, part of the first sobriety, the long hard years of diligent study when I first read the myths and began to write with seriousness, having packed my guitar away for good, exchanging big night music for its greater resonance on the page:

Birth waters breaking, lives passing over and through each other, creation stories amid the Flood, creativity’s womb, delving this freight of words on the next daily shore, jots and jisms of finned fire in a wild nutritive soak, the ship and the fish, Brendan and MacOdrum, both augments and vassals of that womb, that first principle of water, the fluid freedom of the extra-continental, unconsonantal Yes ...


***

The mythologem is exquisitely displayed in this tale of the birth of the child-god from Polynesian lore, retold by Kerenyi:

Maui ... tells of his own birth. Apart from the sea, he had a divine mother who bore him on the seashore, and prematurely that. “I was born at the side of the sea, and was thrown by you” -- so he tells his mother -- “into the foam of the surf, after you had wrapped me in a tuft of your hair, which you cut off for the purpose; then the seaweed formed and fashioned me, as caught in its long tangles the ever heaving surges of the sea rolled me, folded as I was in them from side to side; at length the breezes and squalls which blew from the ocean drifted me onto shore again, and the soft jelly-fish of the long sandy beaches rolled themselves round me to protect me.” HIs divine ancestor, Tama-nui-ki-ti Rangi, unwound the jelly-fishes and perceived a human being -- Maui. (ibid. 48)

***

Interesting here that there is a cataclysm -- the premature or untimely separation from the first womb -- and a carrying to term in the the second, greater term. One things of Dionysos born prematurely from Semele when she was immolated gazing on the face of her husband (well, we are told, she asked for it) and Zeus taking the infant and carrying it to term inside his own thigh.

Mythologems are so powerful that they grip our other, concrete mind as well, becoming what K. called “philosogems”, carrying to term first ideas.Anaximander thus theorized that “fish or fish-like beings were born of warm water and earth. In these beings men were formed. The embryos remained in the earth till puberty. Then the fishlike beings opened. Men and women came out, already capable of sustaining themselves.” (ibid 47)


***

Later natural philosophers would also theorize that of an aqueous birth of the human race -- Kerenyi mentions the 18th century scientist Olan of Jena, who theorized that the first man”must have developed from a uterus much larger than the human one ... the sea.” And I’ve mentioned here Sandor Ferenszi, disciple of Freud whose “Thalassa” clearly links human psychology with the sea, our ocean brains lowest-stem, the memory of the first fish to crawl ashore.

THALASSA

(Jan. 2003)

Travel down the monkey’s ass &
You’ll find a fish’s tail, finned for
Sailing the biggest womb of all.
Beyond foolery, these motions
Are more riven, nigh desperate
To swim and fuck and eat. That’s all.
That road is five hundred million
Years long; and deep, too, sounding some
thirty thousand leagues of salt blue.
The fish’s tail hangs from my own a
Very long ways back and down; that’s
Good comfort as I fan ahead
With my tribe, who think their brains have
Brighter synapses than the sea’s.
May all I fling swim deep in thee.


It’s easy to posit an ocean birth “literologem” as a driving fuse of literary production, perhaps all creative productions, since artistic creation always involves a giving birth or bringing forth, out of from the chaotic plermoma of some fructive sea a child which bears unmistakable traces of its creator and yet is a wholly individual life.

Melville, certainly was harrowed by the seas he had sailed, returning to his ocean again and again to get to Themes that had not adequately been spoken of in his day (nor, perhaps, in our own). He trusted only Sea-roads to adequately tell the truth, and sea-depths to get to his point. “Better to sink in boundless deeps, than to float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye Gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.”

Even where there was no sea did Melville locate it, and thus empower him in a saying that lent his prose an oceanic sort of power. In “John Marr,” a sailor is forced to land as the result of an injury suffered at the hands of pirates, and works his way inland, ending finally at a prairie settlement. Melville asks us or himself what a man does after his great sea voyages, physical or imagined:

***

Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. “It is the bed of a dried-up sea,” said the companionless sailor -- no geologist -- to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanses bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that to alert eyes and ears, emanates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.

But a scene quite at variance with one’s antecedents may yet rove suggestive of them. Hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.

***

And as the imagined sea provides a vehicle for oceanic reveries, so John Marr is thus able to connect with his lost friends, and Melville with his past creations:

***

Though John Marr’s shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of meditation they were like phantoms of the dead. As the growing sense of his environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms, next to those of wife and child, became spiritual companions, losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life. And they were lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns.

... Twined we were, entwined, then riven,
Ever to new embracements driven,
Shifting gulf-weed of the main!
And how if one here shift no more,
Lodged by the flinging surge ashore?

Nor less, as now, in eve’s decline,
Your shadowy fellowship is mine.
Ye float around me, form and feature: --
Tattooings, ear-piercings, love-locks curled;
Barbarians of man’s simpler nature,
Unworldly servers of the world.
Yea, present all, and dear to me,
Though shades, or scouring China’s sea.

***

So ferry on, sweet salt reveries, propounder of the pregnant wave ...



Jan. 2 (Monday), 5:24 a.m.

Warm again this morning, a 60-ish breeze working through the opened windows around this chair, my wife sleeping upstairs on a spit of hot flashes, hating the balmy weather of the day, though for me it’s seemed respite enough -- we Floridians are such wimps -- from days markedly cooler, far from the white fevers of summer. As the day yesterday breezed into the mid-70s, I took down the Christmas tree in the center of the garden, set back the birdbath, and went behind the garage to cut up limbs and branches from the two live oaks at the edge of our property that had been collecting since the summer. Sweating in an afternoon of a certain stillness not halcyon but devoid of harder certainties, with football yahoos a few doors down watching the Miami game by their pool in back & our neighbors across the street painting their house while the guy next door stands by with hands in his overalls pockets talking and talking & my wife inside laboring away on curtains at the farmhouse dining table she’s converted to a measuring station, brow furrowed with care & our longhaired stray Red dozed stretched out in a sunbeam by some bushes ...

... Starting time, mewling in the wan warm weather, a fecund absorption of radiant energies with no reply yet needed, required, compulsed ...

***

As he was writing Moby-Dick Melville’s literary imagination underwent a transformation: The book he started out to write turned into something wholly other, deeper, wilder, madder, richer, blasted. Delbanco in his new biography accounts for a number of reasons:

1) A 3-year stint living in New York City, in which he wrote Mardi, Redburn, White Jacket and the beginnings of Moby-Dick:

Moving clause by clause through Melville’s New York prose is like strolling, or browsing, on a city street; each turn of phrase brings a fresh association; sometimes we are brought up short by a startling image requiring close inspection; sometimes a rush of images flickers by; but there is always the feeling of quickened pulse of some unpredictable excitement, in aftermath or anticipation. (119)

2) Melville’s sense that no one had yet captured the essence of the Theme he wished to write about, a whaling voyage. There were parallels in other arts; he was particularly drawn to the sea-scapes of J.M. Turner, “in which he saw intimations of what he was to call the “howling infinite.” Early in his new book he describes a painting of an indistinct sea scene consisting of ‘“unaccountable masses of shades and shadows” that seemed to him an effort “to delineate chaos” itself. (122) ,,, If Melville found oceanic truth in Turner, he had not encountered anything comparable in words. (123)

How, then, to get words to fully sail in like fashion to the Pequod? There were technical issues; description and narrative were not enough. He wrote to Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast:

Blubber is blubber, you know, tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; -- + to cook the thing, you must needs throw in a little fancy which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.

3. A sudden wild influx of deep waters into his literary imagination from elders living and dead. He struck up a fortuitous friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, reading and then reviewing Mosses at An Old Manse, finds himself desiring to reply in kind. Though for many that book was seen as bed-side reading, Melville quickly sensed a gnostic darkness lucent in its undersides which he, too, wished to welcome and advance. He wrote of Hawthorne,

Spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side -- like the darker half of a physical sphere -- is shrouded in blackness, ten times black ... You may be witched by his sunlight, -- transported by the bright gliding in the skies he builds over you; -- but there is the blackness of the darkness beyond; and even his bright glidings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.

His reading at this time also jumped off the deep end, so to speak, with a backward glance. He read Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aenid, finding a high liquid language for his prose. He read with great interest Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein drawn to the figures of “an errant genius who hunts down the quasi-human monster he has created after it has turned against him and murdered the woman he loves” (Delbanco 129).

And then there was Shakespeare. Melville’s reading of the Bard had been slight (he complained that all the editions he had previously encountered had such small type he could barely read the text), and he wasn’t much impressed by contemporary stagings of his plays. But then he came across a readable edition and found himself immersed, engrossed, enrapt with the courses of a literary mind which took him as a reader, diving deeply in exactly the manner he inteded to write. Shakespeare, Melville exclaimed,

insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character to utter, or even hint of them.

5. And finally, Melville got the balls to go for the big one. Empowered to say and speak because Shakespeare had dared to, Melville embraced an indefinable madness (the “secret motto” of Moby-Dick) which provided the literary device for harrowing the Lascauxian depths of the tragic hero he named Ahab. With such a commander at the helm, Melville too found voice for the uterine sea itself, and speak as both ship and fish, captain and prey, gnostic zealot and embracing abyss. With this voice Melville could locate the white whale, a creature which the critic Richard Slotkin has said is “at once masculine and feminine, a phallus and an odalique, enticing and overwhelmingly erotic” -- “a creature both exquisite and appalling,” Delbanco writes, “in which the whole originating force of creation seems concentrated” (139) Or, to lower a whale-boat with our Creator Melville holding the harpoon,

A gentle joyousness -- a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested in the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

But the real miracle of Moby-Dick, what maskes it for me a gnostic gospel essential for our time, is that that Melville managed to house that far enraged mad sea tragedy right inside the life of every reader, so that my reading-chair becomes the highest stoop on the Pequod’s main-mast.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

So though my morning be dry and calm and saturated with suburban satieties, the grand wild dark is crashing yet against these windows; and jaws are rising up from below like an angel’s claw to rip me from sweet vantage, to haul me, screaming and twisting, down three miles of bubbly abysm into eternal freezing dark. Finis. To know that is sheer madness -- sheer truth. The howl of Shakespeare and Melville is to dive willingly into the aphotic keep, to harrow that dark heart, returning here a bucket of blackened blue -- spermacetti of the archangel Michael before he lifted from Manannan, the tolling of Davy Jones’s cold ball bells, the angelus of the eternal sea folding and crashing at this paper shore I walk every day.




Tuesday, Jan. 3, 4:45 a.m.

Breezes hauling something harder on yet-distant wings, flutters of rain, fluting angel’s sighs in the boughs -- 50 miles north of here a front raged across the peninusla but here it’s still, adamantly, warm, calm, even buoyant. We’ve a few more days of this before a promised freeze. Last night we slept with the a/c on, my wife’s hot flashes reacting noxiously to the unseasonable weather; but we keep the comforter nearby. Stasis is not a durable good in this charged season.

***

OK: Dark water, blue abysm, Davy Jones’s ballsy bells in hell, paper shore, wild peramble, crash and fold and ebb, etc, etc etc. ad infinitum et nausuem: my Tropes of Soaking Blue are all rusty by now, shopworn, their rope-ends frayed and embedded with so many scales and teeth and shreds of blubber.

So what r ye getting at, matie? What’s the point of this incessant daily lowering to engage and lance the same old same old Leviathan who tolls yer every church-bell? Is this bliss, or compulsion’s too-resonant wave-ebbing hiss? And is gnosticism enough? At what expense this daily vowel movement of blue mordents? I harrow the same old hallows; endlessly launch the vowels; aim for the same spot behind the flukes, full knowing what is far bigger and wilder and stronger than I will ever delve proper adverbs for.

Is the disconnect too great with the day, has that been permanently sundered? I make peace with paper seas and gods and Beloveds, freeing actual days to crunch and lurch and wheel on as they do and must, freed from any attempt here to rudder or mast them with infinite blues. But that keeps me from saying much about the world George Bush and his neocon holy jackboots have seized control of; about the earth that warms and the AIDs that swarms and the neon lustre that disarms the rabble of its outrage, lining ruin with the smarmy pink bosomage of cultural arrears.


Do my sources too strip-mine the world of its final vestiges of daily sooth? Poems are literalogems; like philosgems and mythologems, are primal: they plunge to sources; they hearken seaward in a cochineal sense, they plunge in and down sexually into an infinte infancy of boundless bliss; there is a dark madness in their verbal travails, a sense which dives or dowses, trusting darker regions to delve greater truths; it is both a backwards glance and personal nekyia, submitting to the howling gale beneath this chair that these words be harrowed in their greatest augment, which is, I suppose, as close to scripture as one gets to write.

But such ocean motions are as fixed as the gravitas of birth: every word poured here fell from that first womb, and is fated to course back towards it. It’s not clear whether a literature today can delve as deep as Melville’s whale, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet sails his soliloquies beyond the grave, as the pilot Palinurus in Book V of Virgil’s Aenid, under a spell from the god of sleep, plunges into the ocean and drowns; not clear at all; there may be limits to the depths our language can harrow, and they may all have been reached.

If so, then why bother? If each new age or generation subsists on shallower articulations, more suburban rages (grand mal conflagrations ebbing to petit mal pouts), with every visual access granted but fewer words for what is thus revealed, what the hell am I saying that I should be saying? Are adequate maps enough? Providing sufficient witness to a drone?

Or is the job of the writer (OK, this writer) to continue clearing acreage and lifting stones, planting and harvesting these crops of wave-like words, careering in a world beneath careers, in worlds beneath The World? Do I carry on my father’s work, who left New York City in ‘75 to build chapel in the woods, finding an alphabet in standing stone to write an older deeper truer name of the Christian God of fallen cities?

Is my job to keep on keepin’ on providing that low bass note for the culture, so low that most can’t hear it anymore?

***

I dreamt last night of rehearsing with a church choir the way I used to when I was a teeneager, 30 years ago, back in the 70s world of Nixon and Vietnam, of terrorism in Munich and Alice Cooper and “All in the Family” on TV: I was singing with this unaccustomed, rusty voice, trying to remember the old songs though I was such a bad fit fo them anymore, just wearing shorts -- no shoes no shirt, how could I attend church? But when practice ended and the group began to make its way toward church, I grabbed someone’s guitar case thinking it was still mine, and then lost my way linking up with a group that was headed for the church. Ending up instead in a basement of a large middle-class home (the owners had a huge car or van seating 20 which I barely did not fit into, with all the others headed for church) -- overstuffed chairs, trophies, all sorts of family overstock stored in this dark place -- And while the others headed for church I instead tried to find my own way home by walking through a forest next to the city, trying to scrape the dirt of history away from a flagstone, trying to remember my teens, my old high faith, its certainty, the archangelic tempests of that adolescence which were then still pure and new and absolute ...



HYMN TO PRIAPUS

Jan. 3. 2006

Statues of Priapus, ithyphallic
son of Aphrodite and Dionysos,
were set in Roman gardens
to promote fertility while
warding off thieves and pilferers.

He walks behind me, laughing low,
gloating, dragging his huge phallus
like a swollen tail or Cupid’s rudder,
just finished or readying I can’t tell,
humming a bawdy tune from
the lowest dive in high heaven,
& uttering, at ear’s length, a curse
that my urges steal in kind from me:

rumpatur, precor, usque mentulaque
nequiquam sibi pulset umbilicum

Good lord! Is what possessed me
to creep back into Eden and steal
those cabbages by moonlight
what now possesses me to cross
all borders in pursuit of pussies
and mouths and asses, each a
noose for shame that He ganders
with ditch-gutterals then gooses?
He laughs somewhere behind me,
or under, the rudest deity of all,
still regnant and potent in fascinosum
and pure thrall, parting the sheaves
and branches with proud mentule
at oak-limb’s length, knocking against
my head this cudgel of verses ruddied
from his rout. Surrender is the only
escape from Him but submit here
only if you dare; delight in slackened
angel’s wings if you purpose
slickened pubes, the wave-crest
of thrust in Eve’s own soak,
the salt plumage of ball-deep hairs
absconded from all your heirs.
For steal you thus, thy fruit is His.