Mysteries of Bliss VI: Theorems and Proofs

“The sixth century BC was a period of remarkable religious ferment when the ordinary individual, who enjoyed no gentile privilege was become more and more concerned about the after-life. The Isles of the Blessed were reserved for heroes and those favored by the gods, or what usually amounted to the same thing, by birth, for Homer had no care for the common man’s soul. The initiation ceremony at Eleusis, impressive and satisfying by its own nature, seemed to proffer some real hope, and for those who returned death had apparently lost much of its terror. It seems strange, of course, that a belief in future immortality could grow out of a humble ritual connected with a fertile patch of land, or one long-forgotten palace ceremony involving, as in the case of Athena and Erecthoneus, a goddess and a king. Yet so it was, and although the details of the mysteries have remained a secret, some general notions may be gleaned about them from the reports of witnesses in various ages.”

- John Pollard, “The Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Seers, Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution of the Sixth Century BC

***

Fear of death, of its shadowy girth
which made entering its door so chill-
Tartarean, shorn of one’s beloved bones,
with no tongue to savor sweetness
or belt the all-night blues, no sex
to stir ambrosial reveries of coming home again -- horrible. Or so we think. Neuropsychiatrists
are learning how behavior acts like a
swizzle stick in the brain, mixing up
elixirs of desired mood: Young women
gush and talk for the oxytocin which
such intimate details released. Such
love is their drug and they can’t get
enough of it -- think soaps, Harlequin
romances, the Lifetime channel,
HSN’s 24-hour girlfriend babble
on shoes and creams and faux jewels.
Their talk weaves the nest: It makes
good biological sense, to paint the ears
of maids with the echo of distant wedding
bells, attuning every other sense toward
that fragrant ideal. (Know what
the most popular scent is among
women? Baby powder.) For
guys, well, it seems we can’t stop
babbling on about sex: What
is it that such clabbering of the tongue
tolls in the brain? Perhaps the feeling
of sanction against death? An intimacy
with the ever-burning light which shines
behind a woman’s smile ... Do men jones
conversing with dreamt pussy,
as if thus stirring their penises
round and down back to a woman
which makes a spirit right,
invulnerable against decrepitude
and age? Does the sexual lubricant
loosed by some psychoenzime
serve as immortal baste, where no
man ages but cavorts the beach
where love’s endless first encounters
singing tra la la? Apollo and Zeus
and Hermes and Heracles were
all such ever-first children, and
their libidos bear them out, weaning
our imaginations on the starry
couplings of their fate; perhaps the
starkest child of them all on that
beach is Hades, lord of the darkest
third of world, who looked on Kore
playing in that springtime field and
was stricken to his core, his dreadful
realm poised so perfectly against
her naive naiad sport that the two
were halves heart, black-hooved lust
and blue-eyed innocence, looping
one circuit in the human brain with
something close to fate or zeitgeist
or gnosis. We each must go crazy in
that loop to sustain our species story,
but women and men go through the
other way from each other.
A maiden ages into the maid when she
gives birth, she ages further as she rears
her young, suffering all her mother did
when a dark man appeared at the
door & stole her away, carrying her off
to fates beyond the nest, above and beneath
the grave. Such toil further ages her into
the crone, that keeper of the Mysteries
whose hooded visage and exposed vulva
crowned medieval doors and portals,
a sheilanagig fertile now for death’s chill
seed, nesting in the grave’s own womb.
Through all the stations of her
purgatory, a woman tends to life,
her arc parallel to it, its boon companion
til death takes her for his queen.
For men there is no this to that:
it’s always sex and death; each
stroke’s the same no matter which
orifice he plunges or even whose,
the more the merrier. Each union
thimbles out a sea that he keeps
trying to measure, outnumbering his
death. It makes good biological sense,
sowing lifelong seed as far as wide as myths
can scatter, giving life its surest
chance to root and flourish in every
any nook. All those rapturous nights
I raptored, whiskey glass in one hand,
lassie’s ass just beyond the other --
I was conjuring that old sufficient man
of tundra hunt and quest, heading out
the door to night as if into the portal
of my grandpa’s story, for a mood
of godlike ache and glory, defeating
death with a self-same brood imbued
with all my genes. And though those
nights are long gone the reveries
persist, as I have found that ghosts
are lucent where the sun’s just hot,
the inside funk and slosh of memory
the full metal jacket of what I’ll
always thrust and ejaculate
acting out the man without
terrorizing the world. If anything
I get closer to him renouncing
glut for gleam. Writing at this hour
is best because it’s been a while
since my last meal -- evolutionary
scientists now say that hunger
mothers craft, our innovations
hammered out on the anvil
of an empty gut, devising stone axes
& spears & tactics for the hunt
and protecting its rude borders,
prolonging kills with salt and fire.
Thus I’m here at 4 a.m., the early
early bird out to catch the worm
before the committee of the waking
world tries to snatch it from my reach.
My hand across the page in rhythms
not unlike my penis in love’s furnace,
rapt that rape of that wild door which
made me man and woman: I write
to initiate again those mysteries
whose doors swing two ways at once
-- out and in, forward and back, up
and down, to Thee and She
both back from the Sidhe to
surface or sound in me again.
Researchers now say that our
future survival in this tool-mad
age depends upon psyches which
refuse to age, staying fresh & young
& devious to the needs of the next
day’s hunt. In psychic neotony
age is declared a trick of time and
the magic water that it wells
bids us stay forever young, granting
gross permission to head out
again and again ready to find
the next wife for life, if only
(or perhaps especially) for a one
night’s noctal thrash of jazz and
gin and jism (shouting Yes
cocktails the same), baptising
in eternal plenty here and now,
forever and amen.
It keeps me filling pages, though
I wonder what of the missing father
who ghosts the whole affair;
there is a troubling resonance between
all starry lines which undertows
the young fool’s ways which learn
so fast but cannot know, who sows
but fails to reap. That father is the boy
who ended with a sigh inside a nuptial
clench, foregoing his wide forays
for the deeper one, siloed down
a wedding ring’s gold mound. That
father’s ghost makes much of our
culture’s iron rounds sound hollow
when struck against true making’s anvil:
we’re addicted to woozy dreams of
floozy youth’s immortal-seeming dew;
we’ve hammered out in our hunger
for that flesh vast replicas of youth
-- botox, boobjobs, Viagra, anti-aging
hormones and creams, tribal tats,
60’s rocknroll bands strutting
on the stage in their 60’s. (Some kid
drove one of those Ninja motorcycles
150 miles per hour into that back
of an SUV the other day, bulleting
his corpse into the rear storage unit.)
The danger of all this is clear, for
what once made sense to a threatened
species of amillion years ago is
a far different thing when that species
now rules the world with an almost
misogynistic contempt of earth-wide
mother. We’ll live forever till we kill
the world, exulting Free At Last
to our salt’s disaster. We must grow up
somehow, retool that ancient father so he’s
working here again, hand in hand with
that cunning boy, in marriage to what
the inner woman really needs,
sufficing the tribe with stable fructive
motions. Let’s pair Kore and Hades
at the banquet table we share with worms,
let’s scythe her harvest moon with
the full cycle of our sickleticklepickle.
The old Mysteries didn’t make Greek
culture immortal in any real way
but they calmed it down somehow, humanized
the whole deific mess, right-sized them
for true passage into the aegis which still
shines in their sixth century BC.
They built a cathedral of that peek
into the Mother’s womb, to slake
eternal hunger, pairing a maid’s
fancy to the tall dark handsome one’s
plural fiery phalloi. Today I view that
door I hurried through long ago in lust
of finding love again as a woman’s
revealed rear view where holies
gape and wink, like a temple entrance,
like a cave’s dark door, the view
which suffices to make suns rise again?
Just to think of roses petalled
in such obscenely sublime poses
is enough to baste my brain with these
virile hecatombs, the horses of
that black chariot I fear to ride
but must. I write, I ride, straight
through that gate of mythic ecstasies,
that I may end one song at last and seed
the next to come, perhaps tomorrow,
maybe on this page, or some other
womblike wave’s long crash and hiss
which tides that door I rushed on through
seeking out the mysteries of bliss.

The Mysteries of Bliss V: Bliss and Emptiness

“To the religious-minded man of the Greek world, his divinities had always appeared in classical perfection since the time of Homer. And undoubtedly they appeared not as the fictions or creations of art but as living deities who could be believed in. They can best be understood as eternal forms,, the great world-realities. ‘The reason for the mightiness of all these figures lies in their truth.’ {Walter Otto}.

“As psychologists we may stress the fact that this truth is always a psychic reality; as historians we may add that the psychic reality of such a truth, as indeed of all truth, changes with time; as biologists we may call the alteration of the power that so moves us natural decay, but the essentially convincing inner structure of the classical Greek divinities remains unshakable for all time.

“We have a handy comparison in the kind of formula that gives us a clear picture of the balance of tremendous cosmic forces, that catches the world in each of its aspects as though in a border-line situation and presents to it to the mind as though the least disturbance of that balance would bring about a universal collapse. Every natural law is just such a balanced aspect of the world and is immediately intelligible as the mathematical formulation of a border-line situation.

“So it is with the figures of gods. In Apollo sublimest clarity and the darkness of death face one another, perfectly poised and equal, on a border line; in Dionysus, life and death; in Zeus, might and right -- to name only the three greatest. In relation to the cosmos as a whole, these divinities are merely certain aspects of it; in themselves, they are wholes., ‘worlds’ which have aspects in their turn, and contradictory aspects for the very reason that their structure combines contradictions in perfect equilibrium.”


-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology, 103-4




Here on this cool Sunday morning
on the last late porches of the year,
where the dark never quite leaves
the day, making light hang wan and heavy,
ever turning back to sleepy winter dreams:
Today I feel so far from those noctal
noons of the cocksure spirit
that even my imagination finds it
difficult to keep up this poem’s round
through every station in the
purgatory of bliss. Of late I’ve been
infected with a mood so hollow
that I feel close to the jumping-off
place of my old bottoms, that dreary
depth down the bottle where I
could not go on another minute feeling
so bad yet couldn’t bring myself
to end it all for good. Haven’t felt
that way in years. Yesterday I stayed
home while my wife shopped -- she
didn’t want me going sour on holiday
crowds and goal-unspecific shopping.
Thus I had the whole place to myself,
to read and write and doze and amble,
free inside myself without the
least encumbrance of an other. So much
for rowing toward the ineffible svelte She.
It was a savagely selfish opportunity
which around here is A: A rarity;
B: Evidence of what’s worst right
now between my wife and I;
and/or C: Exactly what an
alkie in or out of his cups needs
the very least. And where I’ve taken
these love-free days with great
pleasure in the past (very
wrong ones in the first half of our
marriage -- like drinking all afternoon
in some lousy local bar -- or
purposeful & sustaining ones
since, like reading Moby Dick
or assembling these verse excessives
into some more assembled form) --
where I’ve had my pleasures high
and low alone in the past, yesterday
I wanted none of it. I was home
alone and wanted out, I wanted
to be free of that Yale-turned-jail
again, for someone to knock on
my poor door of self and beg
me come out to play, to not feel
dutiful and dronish, old and inept
and unattractive, half and less
of all I once believed: I dunno,
all of that summed on a bad shore
yesterday that somehow I
got to exactly by my meanings,
as if this noisome cortical
howl was destined to crash
on silent shores beneath the
frozen stars. I moped, I puttered
and ate and napped, the day outside
soft and breezy-cool in the
ambience of death. Tried calling
my sponsor three times, read “The
Christmas Banquet” in a first edition
of Hawthorne’s Mosses
(thinking old purities soothe)
listening to Ravel’s “Gaspard de
Nuit.” Bored, I put on the video of my
last gig in 1986, watching myself
at 29 play in that final mess,
too tall, silly-haired, waving my
blue Hamer guitar around like the pro
I couldn’t be, hammering out heavy metal
riffs with those sugarpop yahoos
who just wanted relief from playing
in a 50’s band out at Disney all
day long. Everything I played looked
and sounded so fucked up until “Lonely
Town,” which was pure enough perfection
as my minor ways go, the only decent song
in the entire set we played that night
(lost amid a the death roaring of six
punk-rock bands) -- good, because we
had recorded it few weeks earlier. Three
worthy minutes of Aphroditean foam-
and-yearn, all I had in my pockets after
10 years of inept foolery. Oh well. I
turned off the tape and just sat there
quiet on the couch as afternoon halcyons
drifted breezy through the trees,
my life come to naught and perfect for so doing.
Well, as the Arkansas Traveller would say in
AA meetings,“Everybody gets da blues
sometimes.” His voice saying that in
memory -- low and cracker, juicing that
word “blues” as he said it -- proved comfort
enough as the hours wore on, that
and knowing that my wife was coming
home and that I would have it ready for her.
I vacuumed the house & cleaned the bathroom
& spent two hours cooking dinner, grilled
flat-iron steaks with potatoes gratinned in
heavy cream and goat’s cheese, green beans
blanched then sauteed with glazed shallots,
brown apple betty for dessert. There was a
I-A division football championship on the tube
(snow drifts just off the field, the warring
teams exhaling plumes of steam) as I worked,
the house across the street from our kitchen window
now decked in lights & glowing in the dark,
I imagined my wife driving out from the
mall-frenetics of the season & coming
home to this: My mood improved. Fed the cats
on the back porch, all of them greedy
for love’s food, butting up against my hands
and purring up a storm, tearing into
their bowls as I poured dry food out
& spooned wet food over, the three of them
getting at the simplest truths which
bind us to these difficult and strange islands
we call out hearts. Beyond the porch our
yard in winter looked parched and beaten,
the bushes ragged, the oaks at the back
border slowly, oh so slowly bending in the wind,
motions which their roots sustain, gripped down
into the black loam of that old and almost
lost religion, the one which made the wild
bourne which separates You and I a
door, and welcoming at that. This Christmas
we’re doing the very least, just what’s required,
mostly because we’re so broke, but also taking
satisfaction from our remove from things
we must do but cannot feel. Thus yesterday
was more solstitial than yuletidal, harrowed
in a pregnant emptiness which surrounds both
out and down with that vestigal future which
reaches further back, sighing oh so soft
and lost like a lonely shore in winter,
like the creaking of garden gate
that will not close or open.

The Mysteries of Bliss (IV)

The Florentine Renaissance came to love the Homeric hymns even more than the two great epics. Marsilius Ficinus, the translator of Plato, began by translating the Homeric and Orphic hymns. We know that he also sang them in the antique manner to the accompaniment of a lute. Angelo Poliziano, another leading spirit of Florentine humanism, paraphrased a hymn to Aphrodite -- neither the greatest nor the least of those ascribed to Homer -- in his own verses.

We could say that he painted it in the style of the Quattrocento were it not for the painter who actually did so, with Poliziano’s poetic assistance: Botticelli. The Birth of Venus is not a good name for this picture. It is rather Aphrodite’s arrival in Cyprus according to the Homeric hymn, or, in accordance with the significance of this masterpiece and the role it has played in our civilization, Aphrodite’s arrival among us. Botticelli’s picture contains at least as much living mythology as the Homeric hymn.

Aphrodite's birth is different: brutal and violent, and departing from the style of Homer poetry in just as archaic a manner as from the style of Botticelli. In both cases the mutilation of Uranos, the casting of his manhood into the sea, the whole terrible foregoing history, the titanic mythology of the world’s beginnings -- all this was swept aside. The unity of that mythological moment when begetter and begotten were one in the womb of the water had been broken up even in Hesiod and became a historical process. In Hesiod, too, we hear of Aphrodite drifting, drifting on the waves, as Maui did in the myth of the Polynesians.

At last the white foam gave birth to the girl who took her name from it ... This ancient etymology, accepted by Hesiod, derived its creditability from a grand mythological vision that must be still older: from the picture of Anadyomene, the goddess risen from the waves. Representations of Aphrodite’s arrival are later. The mild breeze carries the great goddess, already born, to one of her sacred islands, or, in Botticelli’s picture, to firm ground.

The soft foam that cushions Aphrodite is a symbol of her birth, and fits in with the Homeric style just as the mussel-shell does with Botticelli’s. In the Roman poets we read that Venus was born of a mussel-shell, or that she journeyed in a mussel-shell over the sea. Ancient representations show her as if growing out of a mussel. We need not surmise with H. Usener, the eminent philologist, that the growth of the pearl was at the bottom of the symbol. Later, this image was blended with the archaic foam-image.

Originally yet another kind of mussel, by no means so noble, was the creature sacred to Aphrodite in Cnidos. The mussel in general constitutes a most graphic example and expression, appealing at one end of the senses, of the aprhodisian properties of the ‘humid element.’ The Homeric poem was too spiritual to employ this symbol Poliziano was too sensual to be able to forget it. Venus steps out of her mussel-shell in Botticelli in such a way that you can see immediately: it belongs to the goddess, yet she is leaving it behind her as she leaves behind the whole of primitive mythology...

From the high sea, stepping out of a mussel-shell, borne along by the wind and received by the gaily clad goddess of earth, Aphrodite Anadyomene arrives. She is an aspect of the primordial maiden, Protogonos Kore. Botticelli’s picture helps us, as modern men, to conjure up the vision of Anadyomene. And she must be conjured up if we want to understand the Greeks. She is the closest to the origins.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Kore,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology





A swoony humid storm-charged
night high-runneled in door-foam:
that portal was the mussel which gave
birth to my pagan, love-tossed heart,
drowning the last pews of my Christian
soul inside a new-found woman’s
world-waking, heaven-remaking Yes.
Three times in Heading Out I had met
the woman that I dreamed, enacting in
a starry fusillade the wave-like crash
and smash of my broken self into ecstatic
smithereens. Three times I drifted past
the dawn on a womblike ocean stream inside
my other’s peace, her breasts heaving against
my chest in sleep, her soft breath lush
inside my ear & all the world blue water,
sparkling to a fresh-born sun. Such eternal
rapture wrapped its tail round me
when I woke up, convulsing me with
the hopeless desire of living forever there,
scarring a deep alcoholic trench in me
and, further down, suggesting the roof
of a lost temple I’m still trying to exhume.
Venus was only the first goddess to there appear,
anointing me in a votive mystery which
must proceed through two more, revolving
and evolving successively harder births,
doors you can’t go through until you finish
with the first. (Or it with you.) For a buck
like me back then, fresh-loosed from all
control and free to roam my will, I looked for
that sweet first goddess night after night
in greed of her rogue roller -- rare as a
royal flush, evanescently plush on the coast
where two bodies find and propound her
milk-foamed hard resound. God I ached
to find her again in the next bar’s smoky thrash,
apart from all the others I deemed embalmed
in party sins (venials I spotted because I had
so got ‘em ). Somewhere out there she waited,
I was sure, for the groom who make her bloom;
I saw her sweetly pure and fragile, not naive
but innocent in the way of Kore, playing with
her Oceanids, those girls who back the band.
Somehow that night I’d find her and offer to
buy her a drink, the way Hades handed Kore
a flower from his black depths, the dreaded
groom who hauls every daughter from her
mother’s hearth down onto the couch of pleasure
which wakes the maiden’s other, the queen-maid
Persephone. Of course, I didn’t see it that way,
or couldn’t say so, being young and drunk
and addled by too much beer & rock n roll.
I saw myself the gallant who’d rescue her
from falling into a bar whore’s floozy night,
myself the only one that night graced by God’s
white light, one half of destiny, desperate to
find its wife for life inside the spread thighs
of the perfect catch. My dreams were thus
hard-Kore, a stone-laced ritual of finding that
first field in the forest of fucking’s night,
so much that I repeated it again and again,
an ever-saggier knight of cups with a vaunted
droopy lance, staring crosseyed out across
the void, driving drunk on all those roads.