Earish Harp Solo

So I think (here, out loud, in the desire of making an interior dialogue known to its exterior) that I’ve been making music for a long time with an Other who resides in the sounds inside my words, on that distant shore of grammar where my Beloved is the object of my every desire.

And that desire is pleasurable through its infinite requitals, an ache arcing up and out toward every bourne which separates me from the unio that I dream, burning for lips I know desires mine with an intensity which defies and defines my own.

Am I alone in this soliloquy with the word’s beloved muse? Is our culture so shattered that the individual’s a shrinking island in silent seas? Has the word become so specialized, mandarin, alien, marketed, deconstructed and spun that it can’t say anything anymore?

Is this just a guy thing, or are guy things universal? Lacan suggests that there is only one psychic truth in human beings: man’s desire is the desire of the Other; and that, even for a woman, the only legitimate function is “an abstract, heroic, unique phallus devoted to the service of a lady.” Ladies, whaddaya think of that? Are we all heroes rogering the courtly fields of language, plunging our jousting-pens deep in the hearts of all that keeps us from our joy, or our beloved’s joy? Innie or outie in the sexual expression, are we all trying to say the same thing? Freud and his proponents have been roundly cursed for years now for such assertions, as if what they were trying to name in the unconscious was literally just a neurotic phallocentric man’s attempt to analyze hysteric wymyn. Though their notions have been fully deconstructed, still a dark voice still cries Yes; and More ...


There’s a new book out called The Female Brain by a woman specializing in neuro-psychology or -pharmacology or -physics, some brain specialization. In it she asserts that the way the female-gendered brain is structured is different from a man; the female brain specializes in relationships where men’s brain’s order and control. Men are fascinated with sports scores and scoring in the back seats of cars; women are fascinated with quality rather than quantity, with the intricate inner networks of family.

I played that notion against a story on the PBS Lehrer News Hour last night that looked at the increased number of head injuries sustained by US troops in Iraq. (Though the military’s count of head wounds numbers around 1,500, a specialist in brain trauma says the actual count may be three or five times that, with many not even knowing they suffer brain trauma. The military is growing concerned about troops over there who were not directly injured in a blast but may have caught the shockwaves of two or three roadside bombs and are worried they may be increasingly unfit for duty.)

Anyway, they looked in depth at a man and a woman who had both suffered brain trauma so badly that their memory function had been largely destroyed. The woman had been taught in rehab all manner of keeping her memories alive, by writing down everything she did each day so she could recall them the next, and looking a photos of her family and friends. If she went more than two weeks without looking at those photos, she was in danger of forgetting those people. She knew she had a 2-year-old daughter but had no recollection of giving birth or nursing. Her biggest tragedy was that she could forget those essential relations, which were so much a part of her identity.

For the man, his identity was tied up more in WHAT he knew, rather than WHO: the data of how to do things, what he owned, what he had learned. His acute sense of loss was that those things had spilled out his head wound and left him empty of the things he knew. The things: the many colors bras come in as they slide off the world’s vast breasts; the horsepowers of Chevys and Fords; the whiskeys and bourbons which fire a night; the maps not read, the roads not taken.

Do love and knowledge share some cortical stem? Does my wild need for saying stem from what I know of what I don’t about love? Are my memories housed in a blue vault knowable only to me, sayable only by me? Is everything outside that vault a space indifferent to my screams? When I am shut up at last, who disappears into my silence? Is this only meant for ears inside my own? When I write do I speak for myself, or her, or her in me, or me in her, or me in you, or you for me? Are these questions which you are as indifferent to as species are toward each other?

So I ponder, thus I dream ...




ME AND YOU


It’s always been the two of
us, me and you, the swimmer
in his And of longing, plunged
in that blue dream which tides
beneath a life. You’ve been there
from the moment I awakened.
in the mobile of my first
memories, you were a spear
of sunlight creeping across
a dark floor, piercing me
where my fingers touched.
You were the womb inside
my mother’s voice, milky,
soft, and so plush as to
pillow my own words in
lush vaginas of pure wash
—proferred to me from you.
Those pretty girls walking
by the front window smiling
as if they knew the insides
of my name, the sky all
afternoon sailing sketches
of your face, Roy Rogers
riding Trigger across
great miles coming
home to Dale: -- the
ache I felt for you
everywhere made me
come to love the out-
of-reach in all, that
that beach on which
you sing so high and mistrally
inside a surf not here
but surely near,
welcoming me ashore
abed to a home
I’ll never find in this
world, though surely
you’re no trace it
with the borders of my skin.
I believe this now so deep
and widely that I see
my work here is full yours,
one sure trope of building
chapels on wet smoke,
praising whatever I’ll
never sound the
swole orizons of though
I sail to every island,
though I salt every womb
in the language with
the salt chansons of
your word’s ball-soak.
The third world which
we share surfaces
slowly here, inside the
insides of your
tossed underwear,
on a musical shore
behind the headboard
of the bed I foundered
all my keels: A woman
you are, yes, but of such
strange blue silk as to
peal my bells, hearkening
a paired symbolon
beneath the wave,
me and you rousing
from a wild thrashed
night of thrusting words
through every door
that names your absence
in departure’s empty
welcome room,
the no which melds
in emptiness resonance
the blue half of your Yes.
And so we sing on,
the two left at the bar
long after closing time,
with the juke of ages
at full roar. We’re drinking
shots of otherness
while staring at each other
in the mirror cross the
bar; in that cracked
and smoky fading ruin
I see the perfect world
we are, the inviolately
drowned dream,
twins of shore and sea,
two happy teens out
dancing underneath
wild stars, revving up
that creaking bed
where you and I
forever never are.

Arionhod

What is that poets are continually trying to name, over and and again, with their waves of curved words? Bringing forth, excavating, navigating an imprecise interior which we feel but can't quite know, not sufficiently, though each song seems to come closer. Closer to what? The truth? Whose truth? It seems our own, but for me it seems at best the most awkward translation of a singing in that part of me that is not me, not consciously, not in any way that light, that logic understands. The Other world which haunts the rooks of my every day surface, which clings to its undersides like some perigrinator clutching my chest as I swim, trying to sail home.

For years now my wife and I and our Siamese cat have slowly learned to communicate; our cat is far more articulate in speaking with the entire body, with trills 'n' meows 'n' scampers 'n' floor- and wall-scratchings. We talk and talk and talk at her and she just looks at us like we're total idiots, missing the entire point. I liken the same communication going on with poetry, with whatever creative jaunt we exercise: learning how to talk the way the Other sings. Is that individuation, bringing together dark and light regions? Is that too refined a concept, too psycholgical, too prosaic.

What does Orpheus know of Eurydice except that he lost her, that she ghosts his every song? Whatever we write about, we have a personal relation with it that art provides lame translation for, as if the shared speech between writer and theme was least-common-denominator at best, a rude interface. Maybe that interface improves with revision and next writing, maybe it only grows stranger and more untenable, hence more strongly desired. Would Orpehus' music have approached infinity had he not only had his beloved's grave to pace off his meters? And without that grave -- without the undeniable fact of her disapperance, for ever -- how could he have entered Dis to try harrowing hell with song, with that part of himself that reached even into that bourne? Well, he gave it his best shot, felled in the end through that Achilles tendon of all poets, needing so for their words to prove an inner certainty which has no real visage.

Will we ever get it right? Should we? Bound to the paradox of an infinite vocabulary for what amounts to silence, we plod on, mortaring ourselves into our chapels, our towers, our cathedrals of song for which the world is wholly indifferent. Who's listening ever, but whoever we're singing to inside our heads when pen crosses paper? Dead poets, lost lovers, God, sexual itch (with its ever-true compass of phosphorescent Fab Fucks), Saturnal old age -- a pantheon of non-entities more true than my peers, friends, profs, wife. I have to explain my artifices and tropes to the human audience; there's always the nittiness of craft, as if floods require thimbles to get down human ears; even when I write something specifically for a person like my wife or father or mother, it's like I've been given peripheral permission by that inner audience to waft a gauzy blue sheet around the maelstrom; indulgence to digress, to go back to that court-talk of an empty kingdom that I may say something surficially part of my tribe. Even deep expression of love to those people in poems are masks for soliloquies and arias which I throw over their shoulders into the lucid background they symbolize.

Don't know about you all, but the impossibility of the task is its very allure and charm. Like finding the Grail Castle, or fishing up a lost love. Perverse, ain't it? And oh so deelightful.



“The function of desire I have designated as manque-a_etre, a ‘want-to-be.’”

“... The gap in the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological ... it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.”

“... Desire, more than any other point in the range of human possibility, meets its limit somewhere.

“... desire, not pleasure.
Pleasure limits the scope of human possibility - the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary. Its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle.

“This repudiation, into the field of religious sentimentality, of what he called the oceanic aspiration does not stem from a personal prejudice of Freud himself. Our experience is there to reduce this aspiration to a phantasy, to provide us with firm foundations elsewhere and to relegate it to the place occupied by what Freud called, in the subject of religion, illusion.

“What is ontic in the function of the unconscious is the split through which that something, whose adventure in our field seems so short, is for a moment brought into the light of day -- a moment because the second stage, which is one of closing up, gives this apprehension a vanishing aspect.”

-- Jacques Lacan, “The Subject of Certainty”, 29-31 passim, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tranls. Alan Sheridan





ARIONHOD

September 9

Only two or three times in
in the beds I have shared
did there wash a single
wave which woke
that wildest Other world
so fresh and new
as to spank the baby’s
beach and leave me
reeling there, returned,
baptized, back through
the womb’s travail.
I woke clean, alive,
and floated on a bed a
hundred miles from
any shore, the water
blue and warm, the
sun dazzling overhead
& the Beloved sleeping
next to me, named
in every curve I had
touched and clenched
and fucked all night,
so soft and hazy
next to me I wasn’t
sure she didn’t
border some
Outside of me,
as if I were
inside her and
she in me.
In that first moment
of waking I felt
infinity in the inches
of a bed, her yield,
her acceptance of
me so inexhaustible
as to feel no need
again, ever.
And then those two
three times she opened
her eyes and saw
me, draining the
whole sea. Hungover,
sore, needing a
smoke or coffee
or a daybreak beer,
irritated with first
light’s certainty of
a new mess of man
to contend with --:
What I rarely think
of when I recall those
moments was how
fast the moment
ended and leapt fully
out of view, leaving
me alone with some
woman on the outskirts
of love’s city with
no choice for us
but to grind out
my sad history.
It’s said that
the gates of the
spinning castle of
Arionhod opened
once a hundred
years and shut back
in a single heartbeat.
That’s ecstasy,
an ocean of desire
poured out in a
single dram, too
salty to that palate
for which sweetness
is all it understands.
I never saw it
coming, though I
prayed for it every
night in the soggy
cathedral I had
wastrelled with my life:
communion with that
bliss, I mean, the
kiss which would start
my real life at last.
Poor fool: that dream
commenced ten
thousand drunken
nights, ushering not
love but its abyss,
down toward the
bottom of the glass
I sang her in.
It haunted the rooks
of ruin with puerile
fantasies of finding
her again in the
thick amniotics of
another late-night
bar: Haunted me
so badly I never
found it that way
again. I keep those
two or three relics
in an exquisite
spinning box of
gold and lapis lazuli
inside this vault
of falling song.
Each time I open
up that box there’s
nothing that I can see --
two bones or three,
a faded ribbon
of soft blue, a kiss-mark
on a crumpled napkin
stained with beer
and bad whisky --
but usually in the
saying something
grips my tongue afresh,
a fish of strangest
fin and dolor, her
jewelled eyes fast
on mine, parlaying
a message from the
castle behind
those numinous
lost beds which
woke me with
a startling wave.
I’m here, the
voice inside that
porpoise sings,
though I can’t see her
with these eyes,
nor write my name
with any clarity
between her wide
blue thighs. Just
a flash of color
in the naked wave,
a hurl of vicious
moonlight on a beach
past midnight
where moody waters
sigh: And then its
gone, the lines
turned flat and calm,
not a smile of her
between me and the stars,
everything now
composing that part
of every farewell
which knows most
what one loses
when a heaven
wakes and yawns
and a blinding light
-- the sun, my eyes --
dowses Arionhod.



“What happens there ((in the unconscious)) is inaccessible to contradiction, to spatio-temporal relation and also to the function of time.

“Now, although desire merely conveys what it maintains of an image of the past towards an ever short and limited future, Freud delcares that it is nevertheless indestructible. Notice that in the term indestructibile, it is precisely the most inconsistent reality of all that is affirmed. If indestructible desire escapes from time, to what reigster does it belong in the order of things?”

“...Its status of being, which is so elusive, so insubstantial, is given to the unconscious by the procedure of its discoverer.

“The status of the unconscious, which, as I have shown, is so fragile on the ontic plane, is ethical. In his thirst for truth, Freud says, Whatever it is, I must go there, because, somewhere, this unconscious reveals itself.

“...The subject of the unconscious manifests itself, that it thinks before it attains certainty.”

-- Lacan, ibid., 31-37 passim





THE CERTAINTY OF BLISS

Sept. 10, 2006

Poor fool me, still trying
to prove You’re real,
if not in any mortal bed,
then on this field of
blue-haunted reams.
Again and again I jot
my ink in spouts
of whale-loud squink,
thinking I may at last
at least have named
a paper shore we can
share & walk down
together in sufficient
measure to the
pleasuring blue waves
I get from merely
saying that majestic
oceans are magic
and yet true. True!
Here it is 5:30 a.m.
on Sunday morning
in late summer’s
too-warm thrall,
my wife abed upstairs
weak from her body’s
wrack and pall
rejecting all the food
we ate together
yesterday. A different
story, hers I mean,
so off from my
that what we share
is the stranger
mystery, time and
habit grooving us
into a pleasant track
of days of work and
leisure, morning coffee
together on the weekends,
walking talks down
to the lake and back
before the day full
swelters, venting rants
against the world and
choosing menus for
the week while the
sun already soars.
Almost ten years
now in our troth,
we find great pleasure
in the small things --
our cats, the garden,
old movies with our
dinners -- while praying
that the world remit
a better lot than
seems our measure,
now filling with
cysts and migraines
and parental dearths,
with barely enough
to pay our bills
& far too little
building up to finance
the years of coming
so called senior
leisure. Yet each
day we’re up and at
it, trying to prove
our marriage real
with yields of
daunting waters
saline as seas
and tears. Doesn’t
matter how I write it
I’m right back at it
anyway, declaring each
visit astonishing in
some freshly new way --
today, say, how it’s
always like I’m back in
the stockroom I so
frequently dream,
happy to be hard at
work deep inside
my Beloved’s house,
trying to erect &
endlessly corrected
my strange relation
to a structure with
no doors -- my future’s
long salt history
on a pale white beach
where she greets
my next hip-thrashings
with that fading smile
which ever and never
welcomes me back
to the song that
I call home though
its foam ebbs away.

She is (not here)

A three-day weekend, having my mother up on Friday night and into Saturday, a bit of rural r&r for her -- she slept like a baby here, both in the night and for a nap on Saturday afternoon which she requested. Chalk that up to my wife’s amazing gift for creating nourishing and comforting environments, something in her eternal self-denigration says is something every woman does, denying her quintessential skill at it ...

Then Sunday it was yard work all a.m., a nap and quiet inner work in the afternoon -- finishing up Antony and Cleopatra, working on some poems, reading the Sunday New York Times while my wife took more stuff into her soon-to-close booth in Sanford, agonizing over what to do next. Hard rains mid-afternoon, a solid half hour of incessant pour, my how the land needed it. ...

And yesterday we were out for a day of perambles through the markets, hitting Webster around 8 a.m, my wife finding all sorts of stuff she like (rare) -- an impeccablly embroidered white sheet, a pillowcase, a metal planter, a dazzling orchid with yellow blooms on one stalk and white-and-purple blooms on an other. On the car radio, bits of the September 11 remembrances, all so faded these days in the great mass of the country -- I guess, if you didn’t lose someone in the towers or have a relative get killed in Iraq, the sense of sacrifice is intangible, like cumulus in a humid later-summer sky ... Though souls surely whipped through the aeries of that breezy day, a high thin absence making our rounds seem off, unpurposeful. No wonder we bitched at traffic and meals and each other. As if we were carrying on something that wasn’t quite the point at all.

But maybe that voice disquiets from within, in a place I can’t name but seem closer to, with these circuitous posts ... ghosts of the age, my aging, of bedposts drowned long ago when I declared myself home and woke quite alone ...


***

In characterizing the unconscious as theorized by Freud, Lacan strips away some associations with it which I have held dear -- shall I go there too, in his way, without my genius angel, without its devil depths? Do I have a choice? I mean, I’ve read this way to here because She led me. Each morning meditation is an immrama of the text, ever in search of an island of the everbedded unio of blue dreams; the wave I commit myself to flows to and fro and round and in Her unquiet salt demesne; She shores me here, today, to write these lines, astonishing maybe only to me, to her too, to hear me say them ...

***

“The Freudian unconscious has nothing to do with the so-called forms of the unconscious that preceded it, not to say accompanied it and which surround it today.

“... Freud’s unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of night.

“... To all these forms of unconscious, ever more or less linked to some obscure will regarded as primordial, to something preconscious, what Freud opposes is the revelation that at the level of the unconscious there is something at all points homologous with what occurs at the level of the subject -- this thing speaks and functions in a way quite as elaborate as the level of the conscious, which thus loses what seemed to be its priviledge.

“.. The phenomenon of the unconscious ... In the dream, in parapraxis, in the flash of wit -- what is it that strikes one first? It is the sense of impediment to be found in all of these.

“Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these pheneomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. There, something other demands to be realized -- which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality. What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious.” (pp. 24-5 passim)

***

A supreme consciousness of what consciousness lacks, demanding to be known its own terms, in its own language, incessantly sending semaphoric waves across the gap, splashing us here and there with the surprising intuition of a present Otherworld, an vast within ....

***

“Now, as soon as it is presented, this discovery becomes a rediscovery and, furthermore, it is always ready to steal away again, thus establishing the division of loss.

“To resort to a metaphor, drawn from mythology, we have, in Eurydice twice lost, the most potent image we can find between Orpheus the analyst and the unconscious.

“In this respect, if you will allow me to add a touch of irony, the unconscious finds itself, strictly speaking, on the opposite side to love, which, as everyone knows, is always unique; the expression ‘once lost, ten to be found again’ finds its best application here. (p. 25)





ORPHEUS

Sept. 10

If I am Orpheus
the love-saddled poet,
then You are my
twice-lost
everpresent bride,
the memory of love’s
addlement amid
seaweeding shades.
I sing and sing
my dearth of You
to every ghostly
curve in the
blue choir, finding
never redress of
the ire, instead a
pure requital’s
vestal fire, fanned
by the bellows of
these lungs which
refuse to quell,
much less suspire.
My love songs find
indifference in
Your awful blue,
my touch too fleshed
and warm for
the intercoursings
of lost bones.
If I truly wanted
You back,
would I not try
wooing Your way,
composing dirges
with lifelike ambients,
the foam of ebbing
waves? But union
would prove disaster,
a surfeit of which
would snuff the very
fuse of every song:
And so I stand with
both feet planted on
your grave, singing
so loudly I can’t
hear you whisper
back in this
morning’s dank
black breeze. What
I want of you
is impossible
and so I’m ever
free of it, a sailor
of verse incunabulum
with not a drop
of birth in sight.
Orpheus was quite
content, I think, to
watch love fade
to black -- it inked
his pen and kept
his lute-strings merry.
It’s always been
the singer and his
song of Her
exclusive of
the bride, a music
of fake oceans
which keeps
every real one wide.





EURYDICE TO ORPHEUS

Sept. 10

You sing about loss:
Try it my way
with nothing to lose.

Try voicing loss
without a throat
and mouth and tongue,

without a brain
to name the
cerements which

once swathed
a beatless heart.
Without feet
to walk alone

in moodless shade.
Your song might have
wowed the court

of Avernon, but
how could I be
much impressed,

having nothing
left to woo?
After your suit

(beautiful but false)
I followed Hermes’
wand the way

sparks trail meteors
across the sky;
followed to the rim

where you turned
to catch the show
of me fading

back across black Lethe
like water into water.
That was the story

you sand up there
-- who would contest
it, anyway? -- but

no: I leapt back
just as you turned
& become

the nubile scar inside
your stare which
never fails to see

me everywhere
that beauty empties
out. Down the taproot

of the songs which
crazed the maenads
to full roar I walk

in vestal nothingness,
a shore where no
ocean crashes and careens
and no lovers bed and

rapture amid no foam’s
egressing.sighs.
Try losing my way

if you would have me.