The Masculine Birth (on Creativity)

Myth’s road plunges ever deeper into a half-lit and semi-aqueous veld beneath the undersides of the known: digging into roots, dowsing for mysteries in personal and collective histories. The further I go, the more I recede; old and older figures appear on the misty road, speaking in older, sea-sounding, tongues, deepened with the resonance of great stone cathedrals at the bottoms of sense. Such daily dark perambles -- call it mediation, call it study, call it nonsensical passions on paper -- harrow the insides of great fires. What is it to stand inside passion so fully as to soak one’s soles on the lost godhead still resonant there? And how can that so paradoxically seem fated, charged a candescence that is not behind but ahead, lamping a way forward?

To wit, I’ve been reading Carl Kerenyi’s “Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life” (again, I read it a bit then set back on a bookshelf in my study where it ferments a blacker wilder juice--a charnel Pinot Noir--), and engage the stories of Dionsysos’ second birth from the thigh of Zeus. Zeus emasculates himself to bear this fruit, sacrificing his godlike zeal for rampant and indiscriminate couplings to become a woman, give birth to this son. And the son who emerges from his thigh, looking very much like an emboldened stout penis, is somehow seen as essentially non-sexual: perhaps preter-sexual, the sex inside the sex which from that perspective is not sex but its divine agency.

To quote here from Kerenyi:

”Two characteristic Dionysian idols, both easily fashioned, were in use in the Archaic period. They complemented one another and bore witness to a myth of Dionysos that never became as public as that of the thigh birth. One of these idols was unphallic. The paradoxical term is unavoidable: the unphallic character is stressed. Not only in comparison with the pronouncedly phallic beings who appear as the god’s companions and worshipers, but also taken in itself, this idol lacks all phallic suggestion. Over a column in the sanctuary a mask was hung and below the mask a long undergarment -- which also embraced the column. A column with a capital is a recurrent component of this rigid composition, which can also include plant life; branches can grow from it. The column can also be without a capital, that is, it can be a post, but -- and again this is stressed -- the post does not resemble an authentic herm. Sometimes, even when the idol is standing out of doors, it bears a capital, which seems to have been added for the sole purpose of avoiding all resemblance to a herm and stressing the column character. ...

***

”... This type of idol also occurs in the cult of Osiris and a myth recorded by Plutarch relates it closely to the dead god. Osiris’ coffin, according to this myth, was borne by the sea to Byblos where it washed ashore at the foot of a heath tree. The tree grew around it, so that it became part of the tree. From the tree a pillar of the royal palace was made. There Isis, searching for her husband, found him in the pillar. She took the dead Osiris with her, but she wrapped the heath column in a garment, anointed it with oil, and left it with the kings of Byblos to be worshiped in her own temple. ...

”... this type of cult statue in a renovated form. The mask, which was originally carved from wood -- probably fig-wood -- was copied in marble about 530 B.C. and retained its character as a mask except for the highly impressive eyes given it by the sculptor. They gaze at us like the eyes of a bull. This may or may not have been the artist’s intention, but it fits in with the god’s re-emergence from the underworld in the form of a bull.”

***

What are we staring at here, and why is such care taken to desexualize an image that is bordered with such ithyphallic itchiness? Seems to me the Greeks of the classical period -- where much of the stories of Dionysos were written down -- were digging forward into an old myth, harrowing a truth within the safer margins of art: making semi-conscious what before had been pure annihilating thrall, and, by so doing, giving us a ledge upon which to stand and observe sacred mysteries, a column upon which the mystery still vaults, even today...


HYMN TO DIONYSOS

You were twice-born when
we at last could see a far
older god. You stood there
bloody on your father’s torn lap,

rigid, serene, columnar
as no herm before could
stand, as if the desire
which once so bound and

thralled us now vaulted
a sublimer roof. You, fire
inside sweet wine, berserker
of the mind’s self-wreathing,

emboldened father’s scepter
into a leaf-tipped spear.
Then supplanted all he built
just by opening your eyes.

Who's Yer Daddy (The Birth of Dionysos)

I.


DARK BREEZE

April 3, 2006

Dark breeze which stirs
and ruffles this unseen hour:
You ferry more than air
in your black pockets,

a jones for travel, perhaps,
for touching lightly
distant things. But most
of all you charge the

air with a pregnant letting
go, wave crashed now
sighing back, lost joys
released from the heart

to its maker. You’re here
in the window and there
in the trees and then gone,
releasing all forsakens.

***


A light touch: that’s the tidal wash of spring light and warmth and power, isn’t it, so gentle one could simply turn and loose pale blossoms in a fragrant hymn of air. Thus the drought rolls on day to day in Central Florida, each day sunny, breezy, and fair, what is not watered by human agency hardening down into a brown crust. So dreamy the days that you don’t notice the lakes receding by inches from their moats. That’s for later, first in the ochering of the scent of jasmine with distant smoke. Then come fiery days of May when it seems everything burns in cloudless skies raked by the same incessant wind, from the subterranean and dire lungs of Set. ...

***

Occluded powers, nascence virile but infant, an infinite restraint not yet ennobled by criminal audacities. I give birth to it here, or rebirth, strained through labors on the page. It always has a cost. “The invention of a birth from the thigh of Zeus had its function in Greece: to cover over the lavish gift at the expense of his own body. The myth cruelly emphasized the eternally necessary self-sacrifice of male vitality to the feminine sex, and hence to the human race as a whole.” (Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Imag of Indestructible Life)


ZEUS AND DIONYSOS

April 3, 2006

We too bear the child. See:
I’ve ripped a hole in my
thigh were my genitals once
hung, cock and balls torn

off and tossed to the wave
to make womb for a
diviner fish, giving
birth to a dolphin boy

who rides the virile waters
of my song. Of course
desire never ends despite
its rends: the ocean seethes

and surges voluptuous
in what I tore and tossed,
giving birth each day
to love’s too naked truths.

***

The pairing of Hades and Dionysos through the procession of the penis (Heraklitos) shows virility in death, in the sacrifice of libido to build a family, in the dark coursings of desire down roots into an aquifer of soul which sustains days with the insides of desire, rendering all surfaces into buttockal curvatures, the nippled milk-foam which crowns all waves to crash on daily shores. Shorn of desire’s concrete ends, the day is all desire, each breath a consummation, each surface and texture soft with post-fuck dreaminess, the float on blue waters far out to sea. Of course it’s dearth, the death of old cowboy ways, yeehawing nights like maddened filly broncos, tossing seed like squirts of spat tobacco juice; of course rigor is the wet dream of detumescence, of flaccid floppy-noodle shriven ball-retracted sterile hours where sleep or death is the preferred retreat from difficulty -- black horse-rider Hades stealing into death springlike Persephone, marrying night to days ... Dream on, Romeo, in your stone crypt across town from Juliet’s, the figure on your coffin carved holding sword in one hand, rose in the other ... Play on, aging guitar master, on stages I’ve long lost, with that blue guitar I tossed down the well all perfect loves dove into ... the virile dream survives its own repletions, the savage sunders Love itself tasks us with. ...





II.

It might be good to know what these are questions of ... substance, propriety, survival? I dream of a night-harrow, you know, a peramble through nonsensical rooms, chambers of a fun-house nautilus -- a tent under heavily weighed by rain under which I try to explain faith to a literate boss, going to a Sunday AA meeting in bright hot sunlight only wearing shorts. Distant proximities perhaps approximate the subsurface perambles of the dreaming mind.

It’s not quite like Dante’s Hell, which is an exact opposite in every dark reflection to the goodness and grace of God’s saved, but it’s close, as underworlds tend to look up where we look down, where one night there lasts 300 of our years. Perhaps the dreaming mind is like how sight in one eye is read by the opposite half of the brain, which transforms an upside down image into shapely breasts, the first white blossoms on the jasmine growing helter-skelter on the garage, one of our stray cats licking his paw on the back porch. Surficial day is read by the deep dark mind, consumed and parallaxed there, used for its own puppetry and purposes. Not opposite or opposed but certainly inverted, the undersides exposed, revealing the invisible connections. What was it I said of the Christian faithful to that skeptical boss of the English Section --- “let ‘em have the comfort of certainty?” She smirked, as if that were too great of an allowance ... Not with so much deluge about the split the seams bumping our heads. ...



INVOCATION

April 1, 2006

Your hand in hers warms mine
as it glides this pen across
the page, sure and sursurrant
as a faint surf near yet far,

dreamlike, silken at its edges
yet so dark and deep below,
colder than the grave. I wouldn’t
write here without her sleeping

in our bed upstairs, wife, soror
of love’s fragrant and hard-labored
day, where thorns pile up
far faster than they’re cleared away,

and become that bittersweetness
which is salt’s statue to the beloved:
a love for what is truly difficult
where we greet the shore You call.



ORPHIC

April 1, 2006

Call me Orphic if I write here
the plurals of an ancient sound
both terrifying and divine.
A child’s cry of birth and death

woke deep inside a golden cave
I harrow with this pen, where
Titan knives flashed and flew
and bid him enter days through

that wound which frees the
deep head from its hood. Bawling
its circumcised rage, the
infant bid me write down here

the tenors of that bloodied sheath.
O sweetest swoon swirled round
its darkest shriek, you arch
and vault the torn heart I page.


RECONSIDERING FORM

April 2, 2006

So they are gone over that shadowy water,
and always before they reach the other shore
a new noise stirs on this, as new throngs gather.

-- Dante Inferno III. 115-7 (transl. John Ciardi)

Our bindings make us strong.
Ligaments limit motion
to arcs which are strong
and nearly perfect in one range;

religion binds us back
to grace in communions
of bent knees. Twelve
lines in rollers of pert fours

is hardly room to sound
a poem, but something
rouses here not found in
letting go those tongues

in disembowelling fire.
As soon as I step off one
shore the other’s here, bidding
succincter sphincters form the rear.



THE OPPORTUNISTS

I saw a banner there upon the mist ...

-- Dante Inferno III.47
(transl. John Ciardi)

Too bent on living to live much well,
they clamor to fan for behind a winged
cloth in a colorful thin drone,
churning the day without a clue

of what comes after. Hellbent
we say, these infected butterflies
of soul, gas pedals to the floor
toward futurity’s imagined roses,

the scent of which occludes
the under-sides of the fray,
the inside job which requires
we live one thing and well.

Cellphone, iTunes, 100-channel
TV, the galactic Web: they banner
possibility’s strange ebb
which vaults in brightest waves.



DESIRE

April 1, 2006

I love the surface you can’t see,
that undulant curl-crashing
shore I’m ever trying hard
to walk through, like a door.

For you it’s different. My
nakedness is ugly and you bear
my weight as a freight
to bear amid the rest

all women haul beneath
that fragrant shell which
carries them to love’s shore.
It seems effortless, that grace,

but that’s just because I only
see the pretty half of it. What
cost desire exacts on those
abyssal gears her ocean swells!