Spirit of the Night

According to some Parisoto shamans, power comes to them from the “spirit of the night.” This spirit “is everywhere. It has no name. There is no word for it.” The eagle and the owl are only the messengers that bring instruction from the spirit of the night. “Water-babies” or some other animal can also be its messengers. “At the time that the spirit of the night gives power for doctoring,” it tells shamans to ask for help from “the water-babies, eagle, owl, deer, antelope, bear or some other animal.” The spirits that confer power are invisible; only shamans can perceive them.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy


***


TWO FIGURES IN DENSE VIOLET NIGHT

Wallace Stevens

I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
And sleep with one eye watching the stars & all
Below Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.


***


THE SPIRIT OF THE NIGHT

Feb. 8, 2006

I sit myself here where the spirit of the night is thickest,
not so much a fog as the heart’s darkest moisture dreaming
the deep world’s exhalations. I am the outward lung of that
atmosphere, and my words capillary pure dark nourishment,
gilling noctal seas. The spirit of the night wings to me astride
a huge white owl skimming the trees outside, her eyes patient
as the moon’s, plucking rats and snakes from their perches
& ripping scarlet wounds so wide I might not survive the
writing of them. The spirit of the night informs this work
exactly where I fail to adequately sustain it, alive most
where no living familiar for more than one hour can claim it.
A dense cold night came to me up from a blackened sea,
half-fish, half-woman, maned with a hard surf’s roaring
susurrations, loined with a black womb’s delvings,
demanding of my words a mad enough refrain, dark saddle,
if you will, from which to proclaim the spirit of the night’s dominion
over all dark shores, all deep sounds where days are drowned.




Almost all animals can become spirits, as can a large number of objects -- anything that has relation to death (e.g. graves, bones, teeth, etc.) and any natural phenomenon (blue sky, east, west, etc.) . But here, as in many other cases, we tough upon a magico-religious experience that extend beyond the sphere of shamanism, for warriors, too, have their guardian spirits, in their armor and in wild beasts, hunters collected their guardian spirits from the water, the mountains, the animals they hunt, and so on.

-- Eliade, ibid


WHERE LOVERS MEET

1978

There was an evening, once,
Long before the summer’s end,
When we sat by the river
Eating grapes and cheese,
Smoking hash at sunset.
You were talking,
But all I heard were whispers
From the swirling falls,
Climbing up the devoured cliffs,
Spraying mist on our faces
Like a blessing--

we will meet again
in that water
water
wine
water
we will meet again
in the age of summer





TEAR IT DOWN

Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

***

THIRD CUP

2001

It doesn’t matter if you’re
looking for God or true wilderness
or the insides of your love:
you’ve got to search
at least three ways.
Query the same engine
and the same pages result.
First you rowed forth seeking
island to island the
descending rooms of a vault,
finding Orpheus astride
gray fishes and a sea god’s
house ribbed with whalebones.
Then you entered the forest
of your desire where it
was darkest, with only
your red hunger to
light the way. Now it’s
time to take the guided path
back from annihilation,
returning to the world
a simple boon. That chalice
that you found out there
heals itself returning
to the lips of those who
need it most. Actually,
the third way isn’t a
search at all: rather we translate
what we found in letting go,
filling the page with
loaves and fishes
from heaven’s deep.

***

BUILDING A BETTER BRIDGE

Feb. 9, 2006

It's taken a long time to sooth
just what all those blue remits
were valving, what heart was
so primed for exulting under
the known catalogue of exalts.
Years to triangulate down through
flesh and sea and words
to see that my falling in love
with a woman who stepped
from a dream’s river and
then faded all too soon
back into it was so exactly
like the phosphor of late
moonlight in my aging
bedroom’s coursings, so
much so that the river
stepped back into the woman
and delight became both figure
and ground of a delighted imago’s
traceries, the augment
of all we love to lose
and lose by loving.
It wasn’t the falling in love
those few-too-nights in
which her Yes met mine
in two bodies’ cascade
down the merry falls
of white erasure; it wasn’t
the drift that single hour
before first light in which
I was never singular again,
having lost all surface
semblance of I to Thy;
nor was it the swooned
autumn which always followed
where I walked enormous
windy forests of cathedral
pines in God’s gold
grieving light, more alone and
more full of world than ever;
it wasn’t the boozed winter
of absentia where I searched
down every shelf of naught,
nor was it the brutal
spring which ripped
out of frozen silence,
mocking my dearths
with virile blooms of orange;
it wasn’t all the sexual
marauding where each
melange no matter how
devoid of what I once
found holy still had in
its plush undercarriage
enough silk ocean
motion to milk the ache
upon a bedded shore
where infinite regressions
crashed an ebbing heart
of hearts. It’s taken all these
years recalling all those
years to drill down through
the blue of a once-and
ever divine float to get
down and through to
exactly what it moats,
a dark bourne of blue
embrace which isn’t
blue at all, nor from any
living woman born, though
through those wombs
are surely how I got here.
A lover’s lover’s lover
is a thrall thrice said
to charm blue’s widdershins,
cashiering strange wild cables
to build a better bridge,
to name the aptest plunge
for my life’s descending lines.
I here ensoul the rapture
of those old departing nights
in which a joy hauled me
over wild blue walls;
only the remembered
deep-sea motions of
those pealing falls remain,
their oil an ink, if you will,
pure praise, blue salts
enough to sea all days.
Oh lady of my dream’s
pure cyan, I remain to baritone
your lost bridge’s song.
Perhaps one day you’ll hear it
on your pillow far away
like musing rising from
the end of every fallen stone,
and smile for me just one,
that curvature span enough
to cross this choiring sea.



LONGING

Summer 2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can’t radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
— Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God’s porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it’s infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it’s like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.

***

DESIRE


Aching stars:
this hopeless longing
for the forever-withheld,
miasmically-waylaid clench
of all you offered in one glance.
Arrival and departure
the same portal.
Desire a wild
gallop through fields
of strawberry wheat
in early autumn,
riding harder toward
your absence.
There it pulses,
beacon to strange
and reckless waters,
open wide and forever
deaf to consequence,
shining faintly on
the next door, the next room,
the next blue bed where you
in all your faces wait,
out beyond the breakers
of any moon-struck beach,
dangerous and darker
and wilder than
this heart has ever
dreamt. But will.





NIGHT

2004

It comes to this shore, the end of days
Which launched so bright and eager and
Full of this bow-spent, ebbing breeze.
Light here now turns gold, then cooler,
Dimming down to a horizon’s pink,
Folding wings to blue. There is a
Shape to this shadowing, a cape
Of black with exquisite folds of
Exalt cobalt blue -- auguries
Perhaps of that distant hour which
Starts the world again. For now, words
Are stained to the knees, the waist of
A tide which flows dark and rich and
wild. The bright lock hangs, now broken.
The lid stirs; a black eye swings open.



***


SONNET TO ORPHEUS 2.29

Ranier Maria Rilke
transl. Stephen Mitchell

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your sense in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

Dark Bridge

The Black Death swept out of Asia in late 1347, and in the following two years it killed as much as a third of the populatoin of the continent. This unspeakable terror transformed Western culture, dislocating the social structures of Medieval Eutorpe and leaving the Christian world traumatized and more than a little deranged. Death and decay were embraced and celebrated even while they bred deep terror. The stone carvings of dead nobles on their tombs no longer showed dignified kinghts lying in their armor, but bodies crawling with worms, their flesh peeling from the bone. Artists like Hans Holbein celebrated the dance of death, in which skeletal demons preyed gleefully on popes and beggars alike.

-- Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

***

Furseus’ vision is dated to 633 by {the Venerable} Bede He was an Irish preacher who had established a mission in East Anglia as a consequence of his first vision and had heard angelic choirs in another. His third vision was much more frightening. In it, he was borne aloft by angels over a dark valley, then saw four fires in the air. The angels told him that these punished respectively liars, the covetous, creators of strife and discord, and the pitless and the fraudulent. {The judgment of all Republicans?} Then the four flames joined together in one big flame, in which he saw devils flying. One demon threw a tortured sinner at him, a man from whom Furseus had inherited som emoney. When Furseus was restored to his body, he carried a burn mark from this experience on his jaw and shoulder for the rest of his life. And Bede tells us that a very old monk of his acquaintance had heard this story told in the dead of winter -- yet Furseus was sitting in a thin garment and sweating ast though it was a mid-summer day.

-- Alice Turner, The History of Hell


DARK BRIDGE

Feb. 7, 2006

There’s a gold bridge arcing
over blue mysterium
which these bluer songs sustain;
over it a distant
insubstantial woman listens,
paused in silk brocades,
that high sweet music
embossing in her ear
the memory of my name.
But to there is an
awful bridge of blasted stone
across those burning waters
which moat the assy
brunt of things--hell, if you
will, the loo of my bad
history and the world’s
which weights all songs
with direr harmonies,
cracking cleffs and keys
with death’s black hammer
& making all seas a peril
if not succinctly evil.
Observe the strata
of all those bad nights I
ferry like dogpoop on the
footsole of my meters
or a corspelike fetor
nailed to my back ward,
gouting a tarry rant
of routs and rapines
I have managed to claw
my way up out of
by the grace of that God
I long ago refuted. That deep
strata of cold sleaze
weights these paper
longings for blue heaven
with chilly clamors
further down, the
infernal knowledge I
gained those nights
dredging a heavy nougat,
like black gold, onto my tongue,
piercing my labials with
plunge and suck and shriek
as I mouth the matins of
soft psalm, a ferocity,
if you will, not seen in
brighter lands, in starrier amens.
A lewd guitarists struts
beneath the oceans I
here stage, holding the
high slag of a hardon
like a guitar in his hand,
gouting a doggodful yawp
of caninical lupines,
battening a deep name’s
augment against all shores
I write down here. Survivor
of that man, I attempt
to make amends to the world
by walking every day
with far kinder things to say
and try to make waves plush.
Europe wears a horrific belt
woven of the Black Plagues
crawling worms, that ravening
which killed a full third
of its citizens six centuries
ago. Vision like Dante’s
were scented by that godawful
rot, a whiff of ghoulish death
fanned by a million corpses
dancing cross that plunging
black bridge. Every bright
guilder of Renaissance delight
shines strange against that
brutal dark, Medieval man
finding forward edges to his
Maker’s Thou Shalt Not,
in an eerie combine of lust
and death, delight and
damnation stouting
cods like high and higher
churchbell spires, too hot,
too blue, to pent to
pray old ways return.
Physic be damned; Europe
seethed to slam the hips of all
a world full round now bassoed.
And how can any song not glow
fell and wild, orisioned by
the moon which tore the
all lucene of God
from Earth so long ago,
causing a vast blue sea to
abysm land with salt
supernity? Oh the bloodlike
measure of that depth beneath
Pacific breadth, six miles
of falling angels’ breath
drowned in descending choirs!
My song has bridges
I dare not know to cross
but must; its next vision
points a bony finger
where I rummaged so
much underwear, trying
to name a sundered love
always to no avail. Such
nights were miniscule
to the world’s more massive
script in which more than
panties were ripped away
getting to the stone-cold
roots of things, those
abyssal tombs where every
song wombs and scalds
and scatters a sea-sounding
benediction which might be
praise or conflagration
or simply the meagerest
bridge over to a return’s
annihilation, seared and grateful
and darkly reminded
of how much there is to lose
in all there is to love.
Ask the moon there hauling
tides above about the bridge
it’s crossing, between the
stars we see and the greater
one we can’t for all
their dark embossing.



A GODLY BALEEN

June 2005

This dark night of loving fire, as it purges
in the darkness, so also in the darkness
enkindles the soul.

-- St. John of the Cross

He hat sent fire into my bones, and
hath taught me fire.

-- Lamentations i.13

This dark hour is my altar to
that dark night in which I plunged
too deep in you and died, the way
silver is killed in fire without
mercy so that it may shine
forever with the tooth of brilliant
moons. I’ll not return to those
whiskey-wardened nights of
bone carousal though I
light a candle for them here,
for their inward tooth of
yearn-and-burn, that savage bite
which goes all the way down
into the god of noctal seas.
It’s been hot and hotter of late,
yesterday 95 degrees,
and the seabreeze storms
trooped over selectively and fast,
dumping three inches over the
airport but just a smatter here.
Storms have been merciless
and without mercy elsewhere
all week -- over Seminole
county on Thursday with
lightning strikes burning two
houses to the ground,
and on Wednesday a bad
muthah lingered over the
University of Central Florida
in a two-hour assault, dumping
eight inches of rain and
peppering the land with
lightning strikes so perilous
that the National Weather Service
issued a special warning for all
to stay in. But none of that
massed here, and so an unsated
heat simmers at this 4 a.m.
thick as the sour breath of
that lupine revenant at
the bottle club right now
who will never score another
woman, ever, damned to burn
ever hotter every night
henceforth. Even the crickets
seem scorched into silence,
flattened down by the wake
of a sun which split the sky
a few hours ago. All that fire
here is dark and makes the
the night especially so, cauling
a weight in me of those
years I was the nightly
martyr of my eros, arrow
burning arrow barbing
right through my gut
into every flank of the sea
to curl towards my shore.
It is not the result of those
nights which still matters
but the noctilucent thrall
which sailed me nightly onto
a blackening tide, chasing glimmers
and mermaids in an
orchestrally salty stink.
Don’t get me wrong -- the
tunnies all mattered, their
revealings and succorings pressed
like pornographic leaves in
a book I pray never to burn
for fear its god bid me burn
my life all over again, filling
those pages back up. But after
all those years the undersides
of that night have blossomed,
like a sea garden, at the
deadest hours of the day
when I’m called to black matins,
by long drowned fairy bells --
a lost city of lust which
on nights like this, when
all is so silenced by big heat,
I can hear the faint music
from the few bars still open
and the jackal-like laughter
of the few damned carousers
to sing the last lines of
their vespers, words I
remember well. This was
the hour I finally ran out of fuel,
lack of booze or money or
consciousness dropping the
a heavy black curtain
on that next burning bouree.
Here and now I am what rises
from that drowse,
unslakables harrowed by that
god-decreed souse in which
I lost her but good and ever
& dreamt down and through
burnt chapels at the bottom
of the sea. I came thus to tonsure
my verses in the offices of a
mild infernity -- blue in dolor,
solar red to the lees. I’m on my
knees and praying hard, my
face buried in loins only found
under blackened spires
swathed in godly baleen.
My ink is derricked from
the darkest breasts revealed
at this hour years ago;
I set these saucers of
black milk at the window
for that old totem sea-wolf
that his thirst spire revealed.

Stealing Fire

HONORING THE GODS, STEALING THEIR FIRE: IMAGINING A WAY BETWEEN BANKING AND PROBLEM-SOLVING EDUCATION

1992

In his essay, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” Paolo Freire describes two methods of teaching that to him have conflicting goals. The “banking” style attempts to groom students for strict roles in society by instructing them in the mores and history of their culture. By nature authoritarian, this method expects students to passively and obediently store the facts they are presented. Richard Rodriguez’s essay “The Achievement of Desire” is an obvious inheritor of the banking style. Freire proposes an antithesis to this banking style in what he calls the “problem-solving” style. This method invests students with the creative power to challenge any authority which has no greater end than its own propitiation.

As opposed as these teaching styles appear, we will find they are much in need of each other in the actual process of learning. In fact, the dynamic tension that exists between them is the very ground of learning. Both ways are proper only when used conjunctively.

Having established what I believe to be the essential dialectic of Freire’s argument, I’ll not quote from his essay. Mine is a broader exegesis that will pull sources from myth, history and literature — the stuff of culture — to help illustrate how the two styles came about and what their common ground might be.

ETIOLOGY, ETYMOLOGY

The banking style has always been associated with a ruling center, and acts to preserve the stability of the culture. In primitive societies, the primary social unit was the tribe. All had a place and function in it. Individual consciousness was limited and easily submerged into the participation mystique of the group.

Formal entry into the tribe was ritually enacted at the outset of puberty by a physical separation of the sexes. Girls went into “menstrual huts” with the women. The transition for them was natural, their womanhood a biological continuity. For the males however, a more brutal procedure was needed; the maternal umbilicus roots deeply into the male psyche, and uprooting it was critical for their transformation into hunters and fighters. Accordingly, boys were taken to a remote location by the older males where they were forced to submit to an initiatory rite that included mutilation (such as circumcision), instruction in tribal lore and formal a invocation of manhood where they swore to maintain the sanctity of the puberty rite and protect the tribe. They returned to the village as adults. The group was served by these rites by channeling the waking sexuality and aggression of the males into positive roles of father and warrior. Society could continue as it had for hundreds, even thousands of generations.

Change came slowly because the civilizing impetus lay not in the collective but the individual. Here we find the origins of the problem-solving approach. In hunting societies the shaman was the real source of tribal power; he or she could heal sickness, draw animals to the hunt, and confer the skills of the warrior. But they paid dearly for their powers. The ordeal of their initiation, a form of psychosis brought on by extreme physical deprivation, was nearly fatal. They obeyed their own inner law, mocked the society of the sane, and generally chose to live alone in the wilderness. But their healing and magical powers made them indispensable. It was the shaman who brought fire back from the gods, who wrestled the spirits of fever, who knew the origin of the sacred pipe which brought accord into the world.

In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell compares the dynamic and necessary tension between the collective of the hunters and the individual shaman, and shows in his own terms how the banking and problem-solving styles are interdependent:

The two types of mind, thus, are complementary: the tough-minded, representing the inert, reactionary; and the tender, the living progressive impulse — retrospectively, attachment to the local and timely and the impulse to the timeless universal. In human history the two have faced each other in dialogue since the beginning, and the effect has been that actual progress and process from lesser to greater horizons, simple to complex organizations, slight to rich patterns of the artwork which is civilization in its flowering nature.

“Banking” education, then, represents culture — the stored experience of a group that is imprinted in its young through a scarring process that both molds their psyches into collective roles and toughens them for adult survival; “problem-solving” education represents the forward-moving impetus of civilization derived from individuals outside the collective whose personal experiences challenge society to move forward.

To preserve the integrity of the center, the banking style has an implicit violence. Authority is monocentric, jealous of other gods, greedy for empire, paranoid of rebellion. In Greek myth, the original god Uranus (representing brute animal nature) was castrated by his son Cronos. Fearful of the same fate, Cronos ate each of his children as they were born ( Cronos = Time, the Devourer). The only child to escape was Zeus, who eventually led the rebellion that dethroned his father. The point here is that culture resists change — even though it is fated to succumb to it.

Fire came to the primordial Greeks through a theft by the Titan Prometheus from the gods. Enraged, Zeus had him crucified on a rock where an eagle picked at his liver every day. His theft diminished the power of the gods because in it was secreted a prophecy. Prometheus’ name means “foreknowledge;” Prometheus knew who would overthrow Zeus. The theft of fire was the gift of knowledge to man, and such a challenge to the supreme god carried a dear price — the agony of knowledge. Prometheus knew that the rebellion that would overthrow Zeus would come not from one of the gods, but from the mind of man.

Note how rebellious son transforms into devouring father. Problem-solving rebels become banking autocrats in a hurry. (Ever wonder where all of the radicals of the 1960’s have gone?) Having dethroned the gods, the creative, problem-solving challenge of reason mushroomed into classical Greek culture. But the Golden Age didn’t last long; problem-solving eras never do. The brilliant light of reason became “banked” in a xenophobic national pride. The sole locus of light, according to the Greeks, was Greece.

So when the Dionysian cult crossed the Thracian border, the Apollonian order condemned the new faith as barbaric, ignoble and dangerous. Blinded by its light, the rational polis could not perceive the vitality contained in the shadow of Dionysian religion. Celebrants of this new faith — a politically dispossessed rabble of slaves, the poor and women — were like their god-patron, whose father was Zeus but wasn't recognized in the official Olympian pantheon. None had access to the elitist state Mysteries. Dionysos brought joyful release from life’s cruelties in his magic wine, inspiring joyful community and communion with nature. In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the despot Pentheus tried vainly to stop the spread of Dionysian religion among his people. The rational fetters in his mind prevented him from "seeing" the dark divinity of Dionysos. For this sacrilege Dionysos destroyed his city-state and led a bewitched Pentheus like a goat to sacrifice to the countryside. There he was torn to pieces by women maddened by the god; his own mother triumphantly ripped his head from his shoulders. Modern psychology affirms the truth of this story: the dark side of the mind will rebel if the other side grows too dominant, too fixed, too certain.

Pre-Christian Celtic society offers another perspective on the banking/problem-solving dynamus. The Welsh word ystyr or “meaning” is close to Latin historia, which gives our English language the words “story” and “history.” Having no written literature, the Celtic storyteller, much like the tribal elder of prehistory, was the primary transmitter of culture. They told their stories at crucial moments of life — wedding-night, house-warming, eve of battle, wake — ritual cusps in the life-cycle.

Yet these tales did not instruct how to live daily life. Gods and heroes lived beyond the social order; their magic came from gambols in a different realm. Everything in the Otherworld was topsy-turvy, a reversal of common experience. Alwyn Rees and Brinsley Rees comment in Celtic Heritage,

Outside the (storytelling ritual), the deeds of mythical heroes cannot be repeated by mortal men. As events in ordinary life they are, as often as not, fantastic, anti-social, immoral and catastrophic...Yet...it is one of the great paradoxes of human life that it derives its deepest meaning from a mythological realm the inhabitants of which conduct themselves in a way that is antithetical to what is normal in everyday behavior and experience.


Here we find a more intricate relation between banking and problem-solving approaches. Irish culture was "banked" in the collective body of the storyteller’s repitoire; but their tales had transformational power because they derived from that drowsy and sweet world “east of the wind and west of the moon.” Memory moves events into history; the banking style stores events into the vault of time. The storyteller’s account is a tale enriched by duration and repitition. On the other hand, the problem-solving style takes events from the woodpile of history and throws them into the fire, taking the ordinary dross of life (those common moments when the story-tellers art was called for) and transforming them into the eternal.

Creation is a re-enactment of the Promethean theft of fire; sanskrit agni Latin ignis mean “fire”, and are the basis of Latin gigno, “I bear a child.” The Celtic festival of Hallowe'en is the eve of their new year, an in-between time, a door through which the Otherworld entered this world for a night. Every hearth-fire in Ireland was extinguished; only one ritual fire burned through night. The following day, every hearth-fire in Ireland was re-lit from it. The new year was mid-wifed by a spreading fire.

There's another Latin word that traces back to the Indo-European root agni: cognoso, “I know.” Cognition is an act of ignition, a fire impregnating darkness, the radical flame of the new order. When its work is completed, only cinders remain of the former dispensation. There is no going back.

CULTURE AND REVOLUTION

A culture dies when the center has grown too bloated with imperial aims, when its spiritual core deteriorates into the vapid pursuit of pleasures, and when it too-successfully quells the creative impetus. Rome fell victim to all of these entropies. When Visigoths ravaged the city in 410 A.D., there was no earthly power left within its gates to protest. But out of the vacuum of that anarchy a new authority asserted itself. Pax Romana eventually became the 800-year City of God, the spiritual empire of the Church. The age was dark because all light had been invested in heaven; longing for heaven and terror of eternal damnation became the carrot and whip of culture. Only at the fringes of rural districts and in the hinterlands beyond were other beliefs practiced.

As before, it was from those fringes that the central authority was challenged. In the twelfth century the erotic literature of the Orient brought back by Crusaders cross-fertilized with pagan Celtic romances popularized in the Arthurian cycle. A new secular mythology grew whose blossom was the primacy of individual experience. The popularity of the song-cycles of the trouveres and minnesingers was responded to by the Church with the construction of a phalanx of cathedrals.

To quote Campbell again, this time from Creative Mythology,

Of all the modes of experience by which the individual might be carried away from the safety of well-trodden grounds to the danger of the unknown, the mode of feeling, the erotic, was the first to waken Gothic man from his childhood slumber in authority.

We find a rich eros woven into the problem-solving approach; desire leads the mind outward to the trackless wood, and no noble heart can refuse to follow. Tristan betrayed the mores of his king and church for the love of Isolde, but was blameless because his feelings were pure (he had drunk unknowingly from a magic philtre meant for his king.) Love was his only law, and his ecstatic union with Isolde was a bold infidelity to the otherworldly marriage of Christ and Beloved, the Church. Many of the age experienced a similar possession by the Goddess Love: Petrarch and Dante, Abelard and Poliphilo. The Church responded by attacking woman: juana diaboli, the Devil’s Door. Hellish fires of burning witches ripped the night and the screams of tortured innocents issued from the sanctum of the Grand Inquisitor. But the bittersweet nocturnes of Amor were not silenced. Humanity crept back from Paradise for a tryst in the profane orchard.

As in the primitive puberty rites, the waking medieval body woke the modern mind, and the second assault upon medieval culture soon began in the university. Banking education favored the scholastic method’s tidy count of angels on the head of a pin, but problem-solving voices raised diabolic questions. Occam’s Razor sliced away the spiritual nature of thought with one phrase, irrevocably forking the paths of science and faith; the physical sciences heard dissonance in the music of the spheres; the translation of Plotinus that grew into neo-platonic humanism transmuted the ikon of imago dei to imago hominus. With no other defense than the authority of its ossified scriptures, the Church began to todder.

We may wonder by now if culture is ever anything but in decline. As much as culture supports orderly society, cultural disorder is always the affliction of the present. The cultural bank seems perpetually overdrawn, stressed to meet the challenge of doubt-stricken depositors. The nervous history of our past four centuries is one of constant cultural formulation, disintegration and re-integration. New ideas culminated in social forces to challenge a reigning power, became dominant, fossilized into mere institutionalism, then fell to a challenge from the fringe. The Holy Roman Empire fell in the Reformation split over dogma, and the absolute monarchies that followed buckled at Locke’s declaration that society is no more than a collective of self-serving individuals. Soon the elitist philosophes of the Enlightenment who had served the causes of the Glorious Revolution and help write the English Bill of Rights were in the crosshairs of Rousseau, who proposed that the wisdom of man ran counter to the divine laws of Nature.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake picked up on Rousseau and glorified the natural, rebellious impulse of the problem solver. According to Blake, energy is the prime motivator; the only true life is one inflamed and regulated by “satanic” desire. Reason is the faculty for resisting desire, and the banking order of culture is an attempt to shackle eros, much as Zeus nailed Prometheus to the rock:

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence, and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the causes of its life and the sources of all activity; but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have the power to resist energy...Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring; to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that to be the whole.

However, the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have showed that the satanic energy of rebellion is potentially as maleficent as the reactionary fetters of authority, if not more so. Radical ideas in the mind of the mass quickly deteriorate into frenzied violence. During the Reformation, rebellious Huguenots strung the ears of their victims on a wire and hung it around their necks, and in the Russian Revolution, "liberated" masses in St. Petersburg dragged Jews out of their homes to beat them beyond recognition. Desire into bloodlust: the fire contained in radical ideas grow too hot in the collective, like the rages of the Titan Typhon. Old hatreds boil over, the disruption of order opens an avenue for brutalities repressed for millennia. Typically a revolutionary regime finds themselves desperately trying to restore order, and will employ means more reactionary than their former oppressors to do so.

Henry Ottinger’s essay, “Why Did the Class Fail?” is a good example of the inherent contradiction in collective problem-solving approaches in education. During the confrontation between bankers and problem solvers in the 1960’s, revolutionary rhetoric assailed the university. Professors were characterized as puppets of the power elite and whose sole purpose was to "educate" cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex. Sensitive humanist as Ottinger must have been, he responded to the revolutionary critique by asking students in one of his classes to try a problem-solving approach. “I suggested that we try to break the mold, that we could write papers on any subject we wanted, that we could spend class time discussing things...”

But the results were abysmal. Freed to decide their own course, the students hadn’t the faintest idea where they wanted to go. And learning, it seemed, was the least of their concerns. “Gosh,” the one student complained, “college is no fun.” The experience radicalized Ottinger the other way:

If you don’t believe that knowledge for its own sake is a valid and valuable goal, then you are in the wrong place, and you’d do much better in a vocational school, studying how to be a plumber or a beautician. And if you don’t believe, along with Ezra Pound, that ‘real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing,’ you are definitely in the wrong place. You are much clutter.





MICHAEL AND LUCIFER: TOWARD A FIENDISH FRIENDSHIP

There’s a painting by William Blake of the Archangel Michael and Lucifer locked in combat, and it’s a good way of imaging the conflict between the banking and problem-solving styles. Being ordained from God, the banker Michael has the upper position and nobly struggles to suppress the usurper Lucifer rising up from the chthonic abyss. Angel of light, angel of darkness, world without end: war for eternity. Education is one of their battlefields — others include politics and the arts. These killing fields share a bleak humor. A professor once remarked to a disillusioned student, “here we throw artificial pearls before real swine. “ The statement easily fits the other arenas too.

Perhaps the way out of the conflict is to see through our conception of it. As Northrop Frye writes in The Archetypes of Literature,

Antitheses are usually resolved, not by picking one side and refuting the other, or by making eclectic choices between them, but by trying to get past the antithetical way of stating the problem.

If opposition is true friendship, as Blake believed, perhaps the styles may really serve each other. Rather than see the ground between them as one of battle, let’s invert the image and call it one of parley: weary of their wounds, the two sides approach each other bearing the white flag which permits them at last to listen.

The split, as I see it, is in mind itself. The great divide is between "portions of being," as Blake put it. One side is inert, material and cumulative; the other side mobile, spiritual and innovative. Backward-looking culture stands one side and forward-seeking civilization on the other. One sits at the right hand of God and hold the mace of moral right; the left-handed (“sinister”) other threatens from the border with a powerful and dangerous eros.

However, when the two come closer in parley, the effect is similar to that of the two-faced Roman god Janus: looking both ways at once. Janus was the god of doors, of endings and beginnings. His month was January, the month between old and new year. Backward and forward at once: dichotomies linked at the seam of their split. (Heraclitus wrote, “joints: whole and not-whole, connected-separate, consonant-dissonant.”) Culture and civilization, God and Devil, banking and problem-solving styles, all can speak to each other along a network of associative fibers. The conjunctive “and” creates a shared turf: a tao.

When we say the banking educator assimilates the individual into culture and the problem-solving educator is the individual who challenges culture, a mutual assent offers the best solution of preserving tradition while allowing new and creative tributaries to sustain it. The healthiest approach to education would help foster this sensibility. Robert Pinsky states it succinctly in his essay, “The Responsibilities of the Poet:”

To put it simply, and only a little fancifully, we have in our care and for our use and pleasure a valuable gift, and we must answer both for preserving it and for changing it. And the second we fail to make good answer on either score, the gift stops giving pleasure, and makes us feel bad instead.

We can take a rhythmic approach to the common ground shared by the two styles. Each works on the other to form an equilibrium. The problem-solving style is a natural corrective for the banking style’s fat-cat, “capitalist” attitudes of moral and rational supremacy. The mind showers light on the mountain-top cidatel — science and technology is our inheritance from Apollo — but the brilliance of that light invokes the powerful and dangerous shadow of Dionysos. Apollo and Dionysos were brothers united by the All-Father Zeus. Objectivity — the gift and curse of the god who comes from afar — allows us to stand apart and discern reality; subjectivity — the gift and curse of the god who rises from within — leads us back into the world. The two are bevels of the same mind: logos and eros, cognition and ignition, sober appraisal and intoxicated enthusiasm, banking style and problem-solving style. Each pair work together both in tandem and opposition.

We might learn to see the two styles as appropriate at different stages of education. The banking style is important for laying the foundation, but reaches a threshold where the problem-solving style is needed leap into a greater order. We should be trained like the old Irish poets who were not allowed to write a line of their own until after many years they learned the entire oral literature; for how can one challenge what one does not know? (The reedy voice of our contemporary literature may be due to there being far more writers than readers.) But then the time comes to turn learning on its ass. Books become a tyranny, their voices grow hoarse with dust. The university darkens into a necropolis. The old gods aren't big enough. As Norman O. Brown said at his 1960 Columbia University commencement address, mind reaches the end of its tether. Culture can grow no further on its accretions.

. . .There comes a time — I believe we are in such a time — when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new. . .

. . .In the fire of the holy madness even books lose their gravity, and let themselves go into the flame. “Properly,” says Ezra Pound, “we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

The question isn’t which approach is correct, but rather what is the correct balance. The old alchemists knew that the retort had to be cooked at the right temperature — not too hot, not too cold. Or as Goethe put it, festina lente, make haste slowly. Just how do we slow the dizzy pace of these days? Freire says we suffer from narration-sickness; our century's impersonal, hard facts whiz by and we haven’t a clue what they mean. For our age, restoring balance is in part a process of slowing-down, of cooking raw events, digesting them slowly; to paraphrase world in our own words. For this effort we require both the banker's patience for investments and the problem-solver’s germinating cognition.

To me, Joyce’s Finnigan’s Wake is such an attempt. All of culture — not only the top-layer of everyday life and the mid-layer of Irish history Joyce nurtured from, but the deeper strata of the vast Indo-European complex as well — all were filtered through the sleeping mind of a fat and somewhat drunk hotelier one Saturday night in Dublin. To read the Wake over and again is to enter time: its tomb and womb, its continuity and futurity, the catalogue and catalyst of it. The work is both a great affirmation of culture and even stupefying challenge to it, a ball of dark fire in the hand never to be fully comprehended.

Another way to restore the balance is to re-learn how to experience our wounds. The battle rages because we don't know the toll. We no longer have the initiation ceremonies of the ancients, who knew the link between mutilation and transformation. The lack of these rituals may account for the adolescent violence sweeping the country and sexual pathologies racking up victims through incest, pornography and AIDS. We’ve pain aplenty, but it seems that screaming statistics just make us drowsier. The wounds are there but we don’t feel them, and without feeling them we can’t learn from them. Recovering addicts will tell you that pain is the great teacher, and like them, we’ve got to surrender our opiates, our quick fixes, our easy answers. To return to Ottinger, he eventually asked the question that formed the title of his essay: why did his class fail?

It failed because, as Dostoevski’s Underground Man pointed out, thinking causes pain. And, like good little utilitarians, you want to avoid pain. No, it’s much easier to come up with instant aesthetics, instant solutions, instant thoughts. After all, instant things, like breakfasts and TV dinners, are easily digestible — and easily regurgitated — and not terribly nourishing.

As the last strains of Reagan-era optimism fade away and there are no more fantasies of the good life to cloud our vision, perhaps pain will begin to seep into the wound — eventually not just revealing it, but ripping wide the stitches. The wound is a womb through which we may enter time. And such pain is the impetus for decisions. All of the real solutions are painful. If we take the easy and traditional way out, we will die of spiritual gangrene in front of our television sets.

Undigested pain is visited on the world, and these are truly violent times. But what’s more enraging, the violence or our increasingly anesthetized reaction to it? The cynical and sleepy bureaucrats of our banking education system need the soapbox rages of the problem-solver, the lion in Wallace Stevens’ poem who will “roar at the enraging desert.” Without that roar, institutions fall asleep too, and their students are schooled in emptiness and silence -- skills indeed for the century it bestows.

CONCLUSION

In the end result, it isn’t what we know that drives us onward but what we don’t. The void lures us; we inquire. When the future stops calling us, what then? I certainly don’t like what seems to be ahead for my daughter, who’s scraping by on bare-minimum grades in high school and whose aspirations dim each year — doctor to psychologist, nurse to social worker. Perhaps she'll finally settle for the sordid fantasy of many of her peers — wife of rich guy. And I wonder what sort of future I’ve planned for myself as a writer in an increasingly illiterate country. Perhaps our culture has already died, and we are next. “It is not merely the tradition that is lost when the voice of millennia elaborated over the millennia has been stilled,” Allen Bloom writes in The Closing of the American Mind. “It is being itself that vanishes beyond the dissolving horizon.”

Will we wake? Can we wake? As a parent, I must believe so and take solace from the German poet Holderlin:

Near is
And hard to grasp the God
But where there is danger,
Salvation is also on the increase.

And T.S. Eliot must have felt that way when as he wrote Four Quartets deep in the blackouts and blitzes of World War II. Even then — and perhaps because the time was so difficult — Eliot could affirm the unitary banking/problem-solving work of artist, educator, politician, all who commit to stand for and against culture, and play both Michael and Satan in the grand drama:

...each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps there is neither
Gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying.
The rest is not our business...

Moon Scribe

IMAGO DOMINUS

1978

She stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
a half moon smile on her face,
fine mist hanging in the air
between us, darkest night behind,
and water coursing everywhere,
crystal blue and deep and silent.


THIS SCHOLAR'S LIFE

Feb. 6, 2006

This scholar’s life is simple:
to replicate that sudden dimple
which appeared, like a sun
up from its first seas, when she
smiled at me standing there
naked in a doorway with an
oh-too-infinite night
ensouling through at the level
of her knees. Amazing
that so much work without ceasing
could be prompted by
that facial creasing, but as
it flung my heart-gates wide
to receive a springtime roar
in elemental pounding roar
I’m still falling down in foam
of a sensualist’s fundamental
bliss. Her smile, her eyes hung
in the room long after she
soon was gone, leaving me
to build this life’s work
which somehow altars and
furrows and ferries that
dimple through a Vatican
of blisses great and and oh-
so dry and small. Book after book
I’ve filled with similitudes of thrall
infinitely various yet numbingly
the same, a scheherezededean drone,
fresh water every time hauled
brut and startling from the
same old Rome flowing
far underground. No matter how
much ink I hurl she’s gone,
and no matter how short I come
of that sound she made
receiving me that one night
that dimple yet remains, cresting
an evanescent pagan smile
at the shore of all my seas.
Desire’s loss is the feral
metronome I tock, pounding
wavish lines upon white sands
I dreamed us on after one
tossed night of love. My task
is to explicate the bluest depths
of that deliria which shouts
in exult bliss, harrowing all
the skulls I mass and shelve
in love’s strange library.
Each day I dare a song
to replicate an internal quote
which framed a smile’s float
across a late-night room
from I to Thou and back,
diving fin-backed metaphors
to deeper tongues of
her salt bell pealing Yes
through every bed in God’s
blue hell. The lover is a
a scholar of all who fills
his pages with a song
tossed down abjuring waves,
writing in high majescule
a dimple’s finials,
high-fiving, like bedposts,
a rock-n-rolling bed.
And for all the salt I
spread back here between
these pounding lines,
like lime it fails to
stay the ghosts, as souls
like fish escape the devil’s
tines to fan deeper abyss:
the closer I recall
the less she is at all.
The more I write
the less she dimples
that door’s remiss; some
day I will have poured
her in full measure on the page,
a singular lost pleasure
writ from marge to lees
so large and wild as
to volume the eighth
wonder of the world,
a new sea’s crash and thunder
where she once smiled at me,
drowning me in her at last.



OAK MOON

2000

Oak moon
cleft in dark
now barrowed
in the sea,
pale fire of
noctilucent bone,
my knees are
wavelets capped
with your foam
knocking on the
scarred and
barnacled haunches
of an old sea mare.
A mane of ant moss
blowing on this
changeling breeze
leads me here
into this oak heart
unfolding to a beach.
A conch gleams
wet and pink
and pale pure blue
here where the moon
is always full.
Pick it up,
close your eyes,
and listen:
I’ll be waiting
patient as forever’s tide.



O LAND'S END OF MY LONGING

2001


Sweet soft gently swinging angel,
Bottom of a cup that never empties,
God’s smile at the end of my continental longing,
Round road I travelled from harbor and home
into wild exultation and then here,
I can hardly find the words you evoke in merely passing.
You’re a pale orchard of doves in the late moon,
a melon bursting ripe for harvest, sweet with
the nectar I am all too greedy for;
You are curved as my heart, or balls, a white
reach my hands cannot touch but must or perish.
I set sail from my life when I saw you
glistening with oil and and sweat, fired by the
sun into the color of honey and tequila,
uplifted in a long curve from altar to abandon,
two half-suns parted oh so slightly by a thin thong-line
into which my every rock longing raced with
more than a herd of stallions’ fury.
Sleepy continent’s end at the dawn of my day,
ledge of flesh I would nestle my hips into if I could, or would,
let me press against you with my own dark lands
and drowse forever til the waking light
amazes me all over again and I surrender once more
to the dream of a prayer of a song of a fire
sashaying away into the forests of sweet deadly night.


THE ICEBERG

2000

This dark room
is brushed the
faintest blue
by a full moon
low in the west,
revealing
only what’s
outermost.
Like the delicate
ridges and trills
of ice floating
silent and serene
down a blackened
sea, lucent petals
of what hauls so
massively below
in a dream of
death, or you.


MAN IN THE MOON

2002

Last night I dreamed
of going to an all-night rave
in some huge old stadium.
It was girdered from
an industrial, perhaps
Roman age, all
its colors gone dark with rot,
old choler now heart’s
char. Techno music boomed
in those bitter bowels,
the revenants all lurching
in their seats clutching
bottles like shinbones
of the beast Himself.
An awful, lonely, scalding place
of human perdition. Why
am I here? I wondered, truly
of no heart to return
to such wallows. Nowadays
I hate staying up past 10 p.m.,
and yet in my dream I wandered
like a rube in Hell.
It was like returning to the bars
I used to drink in, trying to
drink better in them: older and wiser,
I thought I could drink at
some remove, and thus do better
than when I kissed the whiskey
bottles. And yet I entered
each of those places I found
them just as when I’d left
them years before, stale,
grossly wasted pulpits
of decline, surrounded
by the slow incessant suckling
of others as they too
worked misery’s tit.
You can’t go back into such
pickle-jars thinking to rebuke
that low spirit from the brain;
the sad truth is, that no cuke
ever returns from the hellish pickle
it got itself into. Yet there I
was, back in the brine,
bumping with the worst of
‘em in the worst pickle-jar
of bars, deep in the deadliest
of a.m.’s, another patch of fur
on the night’s party hyena,
snapping their jaws at the
icy, vodka moon.
I was trying to get out
of there when I woke.
They say that people die
if they fail to stir from dreams
of falling: So when I got
on my knees to pray I gave
thanks to God for another reprieve
from the howling which knows
not time in any measure
I can ever master
and from the deeper washes
of that brine, which sings
ever of the man trapped
in the jail of his moonshine.




MOONWHALE

2005

The tide in which you welcomed me
and spilt my heavens with a sigh
was greater still when it ebbed out,
leaving me upon a beach more wounded
than I knew wounds could go.
The hurt was like that Pacific breech
which delved the moon ages ago
to cross our nights in sky tidals
as love’s cold luminary, singing
whale-like in its coracle of basaltic,
borrowed bone. That wild wounding
woke every pulse of God and verse
that swims so hard in me today
as I sit in my great white writing chair
astride the darkling, well-spouting
whale of that old wound. Loss is
the bittersweetmost fruit
to ripen in love’s orchard, it’s fall
and split of raw red heart revealing
fruit I never dreamed to feel so
sea-widely, so deeply beneath
the merry blue. In those months
after you left me once again
I walked and drove so slowly,
taking in ripe autumn days
& amazed at their perfections,
my grief gilding the hours
with a melancholy booze,
each oak and dog and child
God’s supernumerary coin,
spilled from a purse which
swelled great and greater
every day you walked yet
further away. It was not your
kiss but the abyss it left behind
that hauled this boat from shore
to sail a thousand moony nights
in search of ampler calyx, for
that nippled swoon which could
milked the dregs of that cathedral
room I found beneath the marges
of desire. Its sea-deep ache burns
yet today, incessant as the moon.
A wild chatter of angelic teeth
inside the falling, tidal croon.





LUNULAE

2005


After a dinner of shepherd’s pie
and sweet red cabbage in this shining
home my wife provides
my father and I stepped out
the front door into a warm
a breezy night, the garden darkly
vibrant, half-aglow in a flickering
moonlight as clouds pressed
overhead. We walked a ways
up and down the street, my father
weaving his arm in mine,
praising the moon which burned
almost full & puffing on his pipe.
As usual we talked about the
mystery, the wild ir- and inter-
ruptionings throughout our mortal
lives by the awful visage of a
primal haul both moon and God,
returning us to ancient seas where
we begin and where the last
room of our dream will end.
Such holiness is cold and lunar,
I think, but last night the mystery
was hedged with jasmine and
wisteria pouring sweet wine from
swollen green magnums, gentling our
reveries into a lunulae hung from a fond
homeward glance, Your provenance
and gold cuspate shores hanging round
my beloved’s neck, praising her
sweet breasts and enduring wherever
we inter it next for distant gods
to harrow and hold up to the moon,
horns of gleaming fragrant art
crashing wild through a cape of bloom.


MOON SCRIBE

July 2005

This moment -- 4 a.m., deep summer,
still-full moon burning the black
garden with cold milk -- is sacred
and wild, a saucer for lips
darker than mine to plunge.
My hand in the light of this hour
is online with death and moves
like a Ouija board planjet, each
letter shored another vowel to Her name.
Surely She writes with that moon,
between brilliant ice and cold mortis,
a miniscule of swoon tracing
a dazzle of light on the water like
the zipper She lowers as I fin
harder and longer than ever before,
spouting ink and hosannahs
between thighs of that sigh
which erases you and I into
the deepest sleep of all, pure float
in soft blue. What I know of
the moon is hauled from an old well,
the deep throat of history’s
husbands and sons, lovers and
rogues, priests and scribes
and madmen too, up from
every man’s impenetrable heart.
She waits there, you know,
for each of us batter down that pale door
up in the sky sailing far to the west.
Every virgin yields to a king
and every dream flashes
below then is gone, leaving we
sleepers troubled at first light,
our hearts still paned with the
frost of old moon magic, the
thrill of it all. O heave deep,
wild summer, hot at this hour
as a storm blunders around
in the Atlantic and a few trucks
lumber the highway which drains from
the sky the last of that moon-magic,
ever the last, leaving me here with
sea-boned scriptures, sargassum
and manowars pressed in the pages,
empty shells scattered at the shore
still burning over with that old
moon’s first silky, cyanotic
effervescent wild roar.

Learning To Write

Avoid what tempts,
move toward what threatens..

-- L.S. Asekoff

Jack London believed that a writer needed three things in order to write: technique, experience and a philosophy. That’s a good way to describe how I finally got around to writing. For me, learning to write meant first becoming an apprentice to words, then soaking those words in the darkness of the world, and finally distilling them into a truth or two. The result, I found, was a beginning.

* * *

Until April 1978, I’d been a committed student, dedicated to a fault to my courses at a small college in Washington state. For two and a half years, nothing else mattered. I walked alone, sometimes content with that uninterrupted solitude, at other times banging on inner walls. But I kept studying.

I wanted to become a poet. Professors had been encouraging. I had a way with words, a knack for the nice phrase, an eye for description. However, I found myself blocked. I thought I had little to write about. I saw nothing noteworthy in my daily routines. I also feared the darkness in the poets I most identified with. How well I understood Theodore Roethke’s fall in “The Lost Son”:

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time...

At harder moments when the cold closed in, the poetry of a Sylvia Plath could be lethal.

And the message of the moon? Blackness —
blackness and silence.

--The Moon and the Yew Tree”

But do you know what was worse? I was lazy. If there was an easy way to forego training and start hitting the real stuff, I was game. The lifestyle of Writer appealed far more than the drudgery of training to become one. Studiousness, my only competency, was complicated by an arrogance that said there was really no need to study further.

I didn’t know it, but I was ripe for a sea change. Spring arrived and I met a woman at a party. We talked late, exchanged phone numbers, had lunch, walked spring streets. Spent the night together. I woke in a strange, sun-soaked world where none of my words fit. How arid and dim my former world seemed, how ill-fitting those solitary adjectives! This woman came from beyond the college pale, a high school dropout; my courses had taught me nothing about making love. I had no vocabulary for such immediacy, no dark flavors, too few vowels. I fell short. She announced plans to leave for Los Angeles to live with a brother. I was wild, I babbled, I hurled my entire art at her to convince her to stay: but in seven days she drove off. My world became silent again.

I got drunk that day. Cried, raged. I had no words for the sulphur of those feelings. Poetry couldn't refine their torrent without damming the source. Outside it rained and rained and rained. I strapped on my guitar, plugged into my amp, cranked it up and began to play, not with dexterity or grace but with the singular fury of rock and roll: a black horse pounding wild tundra, a dragon belching molten fevers at the moon. Here was pure verb, whole motion. The notion of writing was eclipsed by a wetter, warmer, wilder moon. I had come to a fork in the road, and the sinister, mistral way seduced me.

That night I took a bus downtown. Lights of the city blurred surreal through the wet window. I got off at the park, deserted at that late and raw hour. Empty but for the initiate, the desperate. My shadow leaped before me then shrank as I passed under the sidewalk lamps.

A sound was slowly building up ahead, at first only a whisper between the hiss of wet tires on the downtown streets. As I walked closer, it developed, adding lower tones. Billows of mist shrouded the lamps. There was a rumbling in my feet.

I came to the bridge. The Spokane river hit the falls with a fundamental roar, engorged with spring runoff from the mountains outside town. Two weeks ago it was a frail ribbon snaking around icy boulders on the riverbed; all that disappeared under a black assault of water that hurtled over the falls into crashing smithereens. Stinging mist choired up from the devastation. I stood on that shaking bridge, one with the coiled roar. The river rushed toward me, through me, it hauled me seaward. I was gone. I flowed south, to spring, to sun, song, communion. On and on and on!




Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
World, and, drinking, I myself ran over/

-- Ranier Maria Rilke, World was in the face of the beloved,” (transl. Steven Mitchell)

On a rainy afternoon in late October 1986 I walked Cocoa Beach with a German woman. Sheets of rain whipped ashore, fled, jagged angels of the dying year. The woman walked ahead of me, tall and frail, silent, shelled in her mood. Her blonde hair whipped everywhere in the wild wind.

She would fly back to Germany the next day.

Gulls flew over in formation. Sullen waves plashed ashore, hissed over my toes exhausted, receded. The sad rhythms of that day remind me of an I Ching reading I’d cast sometime back then: K’an, the trigram of the watery Abyss doubled. It meant danger everywhere, the heart drowning in bankrupt passions. Surrender is the only escape, it advised.

I wanted to, but I was clinging desperately to the tattered remnants of the belief that had led me to that beach. My third rock-n-roll band had ground to dust the summer before without ever turning a dime. I would not start again. The women were gone too, so many slim bandwidths of joy, a rare night’s harbor gone dry. The closest relationship I’d seen in a long while walked with me that day, looking across the sea. Nothing I could say. I didn’t believe much any more in drinking, either; once a catalyst, it had become the warden of my days.

Rain picked up again. The woman had almost disappeared in it. Through the mist she seemed almost birdlike, both child and specter, ready at any moment to lift her wings and fly far away.

During that sad season, I finally admitted that the experience I had set out to discover had become a dangerous addiction. An addiction, I found, is a short cut leading to a cliff. The golden moments I sought -- a crescendo onstage, one night in an affair -- had grown faint, became memories, fantasies, then bitter ironies. Those moments weren’t something to be gambled for; rather they were summations of a wholly other order that I avoided, terrified of its demands, its banality, its small incremental rewards. Those moments arrive after the work. As long as I believed otherwise, life would be my enemy. I was swimming against the real current.

The woman turned around and walked back. She wanted to go. There was a question in her eyes at first; but as she got closer it drained away. Finally her eyes were as gray and empty as the sea. Fine, I said. We headed for my car. We were soaked by then, sharpening the wind’s chilly blades. We said nothing more. We got in my car, drove back the long miles of scrub and saw palmetto to Orlando. It was raining when we got out in the parking lot where she had parked her car. She hugged me, smiled distantly, then walked away. I leaned against my car and watched her unlock her car, get in and turn the ignition. She was a ghost behind a wet window, a fragment of memory, three curving strokes of blonde hair and grey eyes disappearing in shadow. She drove off into the great silence.



Philosophy, or a discrimination of truths, began to come to me some months later, following a furious spate of final drinking I somehow survived. During long quiet nights in the winter of 1987 I began to take stock. It was clear to me that the turn I had taken ten years before had been the wrong one, but understandable. The acute and painful inwardness of my college days had created a condition for learning words. But I had focused on words to the exclusion of all else; so when the rites of spring flooded me, I believed there was no way I could write another word without those sweet waters. I had believed my words needed world if they were to have any meaning.

So I set out for the wild, initiate to a relation I sensed but rarely found. It was fun for a while. But I was looking in the wrong places. I had literalized a dazzling experience of life into dull repetitions. The endless outpour was like a wound unable to coagulate and festering easily. High art fell to low folly: meaningless experience played itself out just as false and dangerous as my former position of extreme introversion.

Two alternatives remained: oblivion, or a shared middle ground. It was possible that word and world might find each other through a mediation. I didn’t see it quite so clearly then, but the sense was strong enough to point a new direction. I was free to enter the mainstream; I could get to work.

And so the desire to write returned. I bid on a position in my company that involved more writing. Within a few years this led to another in employee communications. From it I plan to get the experience and training to launch a broader, more independent writing career. Learning to write apropos to the workplace puts word in the service of world: the end directs the means.

The desire to write poetry also returned, fostered by a wakened passion for literature. Saul Bellow said, “A writer is a reader moved to emulation,” and reading great poetry underscored the poverty of my own. I was called to work harder. Poetry puts world to the service of word; I take the events of my day and strain them through a net of words. How wonderful to find something gold wriggling in the net.



In my reading I discovered the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke; his Sonnets to Orpheus are still my favorite group of poems. In a way, these poems arrived readily to Rilke; he characterized the experience as “the most enigmatic dictation I have ever endured and achieved.” But we must remember these poems came to Rilke late in life, the harvest of unparalleled attention and effort
.
The poems are about their own domain: poetry, writing’s primal father, a magic that so enchanted the world that animals, trees, even stones stopped and turned to listen. Word and world harmonized in the song of Orpheus.

Orpheus paid dearly for this magic. He lost his wife Eurydice on their wedding day. Grieving, he sought her in the underworld, enchanting all the dread and dead with his song; but his own eagerness to look upon her face doomed his quest. He emerged alone. Later she woke — in his song.

Rilke understood the cost of poetry. But by looking deeper and deeper at what he feared — the fatal embroilment of love, the terrible silence of the natural world, the insinuating tendrils of death— he was able to make the strongest affirmation of the unity of life and death in art.

... Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,
Not wooing any grace that can be achieved;

Song is reality. Simple, for a god.
But when can we be real? When does he pour
The earth, the stars, into us? Young man,
It is not your loving, even if your mouth

Was forced wide open by your own voice — learn
To forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
Nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

“Sonnets to Orpheus” I.3
(transl. Steven Mitchell)

For Rilke, truth, or “true singing,” goes beyond word and world, beyond technique and experience. It is the music of the world as it is. The writer polishes a mirror and holds it up to the world. If the reflected music is real, all creation gathers around to listen. Simple, for a god, but a life’s work for one who is just learning to write.

Pants on Fire

The abbot of the Benedictine Monestary at Sponhiem, Johannes Heidenberg of Trittenheim, known as Trithemius, turned the humble community into a renowned center of learning, boasting a library of 2,000 volumes, many of which were concerned with arcan and occult matters that would have disconcerted other ecclesiastics.

... In his claims of astounding powers and revelations, Trithemius surpasses anything even Paracelsus subsequently wrote. He says in a letter in 1499 that he is working on a marvellous book called Steganographia that is full of profound secrets, stupendous and incredible things. It will explain, for example, how “I may express my thought to another while eating, sitting, or walking, without words, signs, or nods,” and how these thoughts could be sent “by fire” over distances of a hundred miles or more, even into deep dungeons. This is done, the book reveals, through the assistance of angels.”

-- Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science


BOOK (PANTS) ON FIRE

Feb. 4, 2006

A book in the hand
should be a ball of fire.

-- Emerson

My reading magicked
the booze abyss into
descending bliss, the old
jones for reckless dives
toward paps of no avail
become an inside job of
metaphorical descents.
I found my lost God’s
exalts in the brinous salts
of archetype and dream
and verse, wandering
from Jung to Campbell
and Hillman and from
Homer through Rilke
on a fertile promontory
of pure Shakespeare.
A book-to-book assay built
this downward tower into
dark divines, and strung
a eustachian tube of surf
from an angel’s ear to mine.
My feast of saints are shelved
in a burning aviary of books,
a vault of diving boards all
squealing Yippee down the
leagues I follow as I write across
and down the page. Image here
the hungry lover’s pants
collapsing at his feet
and you read the sense I sing,
the urgency of the burning
sun for seas, my words
enflamed, engorged by my
texts’ sea-smelling lacunae,
so consumed by thoughts of blue
that only romping to the
depths of them will do,
each line so hastily wrought
the ladder’s burning too,
chasing the poem down
to its smoking end.
If a heart can think,
so the mind full aches,
its high harrumphings
hooved by a libido
schooled in humping
every naiad numen
to crest the foam
proferring pink deliria.
My book’s too hot to hold,
much less full savor
unless you’re deep at sea
down under any sooth
or certainty that
fills those joyous canyons
a singing voice gestalt,
carving heaven in basaltic
floors of stone. All tides
are margined here, my
sources shared by the
moon and wombs alike,
the cry of first beginnings
in which I shouted full awake
and which no blue assay
can slake, though I’ll ever
try, astride these waves
of ink no angel dares to drink
the fullest measure of.
Oh my pants are on fire
and there’s never page enough
to drop them all the way
before I’m mounted full
upon the fishlike diving one,
plunging in salt exult.
Just like this poem, that
book will never end, the
seas it dreams so nude,
so bottomless, I must
content myself with shelves,
these daily islands like
library wings which harbor
me for just one poem
before the next conflagration
of arcane lyric swings
me further out and down
toward the ankles of delight
and I am fused again
in heaven’s deepest fire
where its words at last suspire
in choiring exalt Amen.





PANTS ON FIRE

2004

When I was a kid my mother
always knew when I lied
because I’d stick my tongue
into a cheek as I fibbed.
A dead giveaway.
Liar liar -- Now no one
can tell until my pants
are on fire. I fiddle in the
middle of desire
rounded by flames & ruin.
I don’t just mean
the sexual deceit --
bad though that is --
but that the commission
of every sin has its
base in appetite,
a short-cut back to
origin. The deceit is
the res of all receipt,
the mother’s body
all breast-milk
and uteral swash,
her penultimate
backwards embrace.
Who doesn’t want to
go back to sweeter
hours, the wave-born
dream? No wonder I
deceived even myself,
tongue in cheek,
exposing every lie
which blocked the exits
of all those lonely
forays out into the
isolate self. Self-betrayed,
I stayed close to home.
But like the heart-shaped
birthmark which slowly
disappeared from my
chest, my knack for
self-evident deceit
receded back and I
joined the lonely
lying fray, less schooled
than others perhaps in that
hermetic art, a fool
and blunderer who
was a good boy
and sure acted smart.
Even the milk of
goodness has its
sour undertow -- look
at me here on this
declaiming chair, astute
and educated, still
trying to forge my
passage into heaven,
albeit through matters
more sea-weedy,
nereid-strange. Did I
get the goods? Did I
rescue the girl
and get my grateful kiss?
In this mockery of
a poem can I vaunt
or vault the wave’s
receding hiss & me
caught here per usual
with my pants at my
ankles and some
feline laughter at all
my sins revealed,
so pale and small,
not a man of words
at all. Against such
mockery I cuckold
every poem, my
tongue pressed in
that other cheek
no one need see
to know. Holy mana,
free me from this
rhyming, platudinous
mire. Bless these
burning shorts
with one more
salt blue cavort.

***

Many years after the holy man had departed to the Lord, a certain youth fell from his horse into the river which in Scotic is called Boend (the Boyne), and, being drowned, was for twenty days under the water. When he fell he had a number of books packed up in a leathern satchel under his arm; and so, when he was found after the above-mentioned number of days, he still had the satchel of books pressed between his arm and side. When the body was brought out to the dry ground, and the satchel opened, it was found to contain, among the volumes of other books, which were not only injured, but even rotten, a volume written by the sacred fingers of St. Columba; and it was as dry and wholly uninjured as if it had been enclosed in a desk.

-- Adamnan, Life of St. Columba

SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS

Early nightmare: civil war in
First grade. The boy who ratted on
Me and Alan to our teacher
For playing Show Me Yours I’ll Show
You Mine in the back woods during
Recess played Michael to my itch,
Pitching me and my kind to fire.
I crept along the school-house walls
Trying not to get caught: But then
Some kid aflame edged around the
Corner in a scream I could not
Avoid, and I watched my small bones
Smoulder in a sorry pile. For
Months I woke from that awful dream
The ruins of what my lust had seen.


CENTAUR

2003

The centaur filled
the whole doorway
of my night -- huge
and hair, brutally
hooved, his eyes like
pitchers poured from
the worst of winter
seas. And when he
bid me climb up
that great back I knew
somehow I must,
though I might die,
or die of all the
waves I could not
ride myself, much
less sing. He made
the beach in three
great strides, crossing
over orchard and lake
and shopping mall
like a full moon in
fast-mo reverse.
The sea at 2 a.m.
was alien and huge,
each wave an
empire smashing
at our feet. He waded
out and began to
swim, singing in
the voice of sea-bulls,
tolling over the graves
of lusty sailors,
reddening the barbs
hurled far below.
A man-beast older
than the sum of
all my fathers, he
bid me strip naked
and stride out
past the merry lappers
of my metaphors,
beyond even the
weepy salt iniquity
of my own history
out into the real
raw heaving brine
of heart I can never
fully serve or master,
much less sing
in his ripe baritone.
Crabs and ‘cuda
bumped their
menace at my ankles
while weed-drift
wove my chest
and cock and balls
like the soft hair
of all the women I
have loved -- he
bid me beyond
all that, stepping
into a riptide that
hauled me miles
out to sea where
the stars above
burned like
a million white
pilot lights of
heaven’s Marshall
Stack, while death
spread out beneath
me for miles
in the heave
of Her darker
thrall. And I was
alone -- the centaur
gone within, leaving
me just one command:
Ride. And so I
began the rest of
my life, catching
wild combers in
from Cornwall
and Iceland, climbing
on their frigate
backs and clutching
the reins of turgid
foam: Riding sweet
emotions toward that
shore I’ll never reach.
I hear him laughing
up ahead in the
surf’s incessant roar,
delighting in the big
night music which
fills the next boy’s door.




TALES OF THE MAD MONKS

2002

Ireland’s mad monks
of the 7th Century
dipped their quills
in black blood &
wrote down old tales
in wild calligraphy.

What they purported
to be true (or amended
to new faith) was
fantastical and strange,
oral gods and heroes
flattened into
florid scribbles down
the page.

By then it had
been 900
years since the last
man of action dueled
the sea three days:
Since the heroes
lived in voice balloons
over the cooking fire,
a map of mind
framed in a distant song.

The archaeologists
who now dig Irish peat
and walk off radar
soundings at Mag Ruath
and Tara tell us
that we know little
of such stories’ actual
bones: The current
task is to map
a backwards land
old, older, older still,
reconstructing thrones
from bent brooch-pins
and sonograms of
ancient, soft mounds.

Yet for all they
can now describe
of how the royal
sacred stones aligned,
their mouths are
silent round the
ineffable why.
The bones suggest
a frame but not
the bloody, feral
heart which moved
‘em so. And so
the scientists
must return to
those dusty graves
of tales, for the
rubbing of arterial
flush, for gleams
in bleak gloamings.

And so the brightest
minds cobble
in conjecture
a fitting pair of shoes,
then conjure up
delighted feet
to leap the bonfire’s hues.

According to "The Voyage of St. Brendan," Brendan burned a book containing stories about the wonders of God's creation out of disbelief. For this reason he is sent on a voyage so as to see with his own eyes certain divine manifestations which earlier he had refused to credit. In this way he is to recover the book by refilling it with the wonders which he witnesses on his voyage. The majority of the phenomena which he comes across are related to man's actions and behaviour in this life and the circumstances consequent upon them in the Afterlife. Brendan encounters souls in hell, heaven and paradise. The astonishing and sometimes frightening experiences restore his belief.

-- Clara Strijbosch, "The Heathen Giant in the Voyage of St. Brendan"
(School of Celtic Studies DIAS 1999, p. 369)


MY BOOK OF DEAD HOURS

I’ve filled two score journals
with the same sort of harrow,
late-late-night after night,
at an hour when the rest
of the world has died, returning
to the same underground door,
the same boat, the same drift
down these pages, writing a
soulish travail which no one
else may ever read, much
much less care to. It’s 4:05 a.m.
and I’ve been up since 2 today,
turning slow on a spit of
dubious flame while my wife’s
in a Lake City hospital yet
another night, stricken with
some deep gut-sickness the
docs can’t quite explain.
Outside at this day and hour
it’s just a sour-mashed swoon,
the faintest filament of crickets
in a vast black stillness
which may simply be the
haunt of lonliness or whisper
of some next gate going down.
There comes a time in the journey
below when a man’s heart is
weighed against a feather from
the headdress of Maat, Goddess
of Truth; if I’ve erred in all this
my pan will fall, taking with
it this book of dead nights.
Maybe the grip will relent
and I’ll be freed to write real
poems again, freed too to sleep
all the way through to the
first blueing of the sky,
hell, maybe even wake after
my wife does, for the first
time in all these years -- maybe
all that after all of these books
tossed page by page to the
night’s blackest tide. Maybe
this pen will name the last
warden of the last door and
wing my way through to the
end of all words, and then
I’ll go on with life like Saint
Brendan back from the sea,
the book of wonders he
burnt in disbelief finally
re-scored, its pages filled
with all he himself found
on the blue desert of God’s main.
Freed to love, plant a garden,
die -- my book of blue harrows
goes on and on and on
in the black ink of burnt angels,
a tide of their blood. We’re
deep into summer, the cruel
ecstasy of wild skies, poorer
and itchier and more fearful
by turns, like pages the
augments have yet to fully burn.
Augments which ghost here
in surges and shrieks,
in stillness so deep I
can cut it with the life
which woke on this page
which no one will read.


SCRIPTORIUM

2002


The scriptorium of the Sixth Century
was a cold, dark and brute room
where copyists inked their ecstasies
amid the bitterest rigors—reeking
sheepskin, claw-hand so carefully
moving across the page, each line
a curragh voyage from I to Thou.
Each copy of a book exacted a
raw chunk of someone’s life.
Nothing’s changed though
conditions have much improved:
I sit in an easy chair in the soft
augers of the early day, bright lamp
over one shoulder, cup of coffee
to my left; but it’s still pen in
hand and the next blank line
in this journal, embellishing
a text whispered in my ear
by one of those dirty angels
gone to dust long ago
when from so little came
ineffably more: voices like
a soundboard rising
from an invisible floor,
from a distant, gnashing shore.
The huts of the copyists
were built that way,
according to the lines of
the more ancient Poet’s House,
rooms of total darkness
where the master inscribed
all history in the
ears of his craftsmen,
line by patient line,
tale by tale,
life after life.
This hand is freighted
by a thousand older hands,
this ink an hourglass measure
of far immenser sands.