Tuesday, February 6, 2024

REPRISE — The Abject Ones, Six Falling - Nightingale Confesses Into Straighter Teeth (Originally published October 9, 2010)

Misbegotten moon
Shine for sad young men
Let your gentle light
Guide them home again

All the sad young men

Poet Hart Crane, Brooklyn Bridge visible, present, which 
he lauded in his magnificent poem, The Bridge.

Originally published October 9, 2010


The term Abjection literally means "the state of being cast off." In usage it has connotations of degradation, baseness and abasement of spirit.

"...descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God." - Hart Crane, from "To Brooklyn Bridge" 

The boys, six falling: Tyler Clementi, Raymond Chase, 
Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg

The sons of delight now shave their bodies. - Mason Cooley 

"He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood
Do not ask me to see it!"
 - Federico Garcia Lorca*

"The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" [lyrics are below this essa]: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mq1WEqFrI4


My Dearest Val,

Even the pigeons on my stoop are silent now.

One mourning dove coos tenderly for these who have taken their own lives publicly on our behalf, for untold scores gone before them with broken hearts enraged, no more to engage the unpersuaded world which, one of them, one of the public ones, in spite of murmuring wharves, in spite of amorous dark alleys bitter in the pitch in the hateful American Twentieth Century, Hart Crane, wrote before his leap from the ship beside the phallic curve where Cuba meets the lisping sea, took his tongue away which sang to us of chill dawns breaking upon bridges whose spans still freely splinter light returning hungover from night wharves' grottoes and denim grasps, World Wars' industrial embraces crushing every man, and now another one abandons his fingers and fiddling, o scattering light, takes flight from ledges to edge close to an embrace no longer forbidden—

And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love... - Hart Crane


I am at the "Way of Peace Bistro," not your favorite place I remember—unkind to queens and "Miss Things"—but the server whose cousins are the famous Wolf Boys in Jalisco, Mexico, hirsute himself, gives me free double espressos for very large tips, of course, and it is not as populated here on Saturdays with the braying brunch crowds, their hammers for pinkies poised...besides, the server just yesterday came out to me in my confessional booth here at the perpetually wobbly table in the far corner at the cracked window rocking with Hart's un-confessed bones wrapped in soothing silt which he now dreams to be his silken pall. Life is indeed strange above the veiled bottom. I do receive confessions here p.r.n. ("as needed," in medical jargon) and at my other, now, confessional spots, the usual cafes I weekly haunt for chasing down dreams, waves, receding horizons...why, I wonder, is each window where I sit cracked?

I am the itinerant priest who sits at meager feasts. Suffering "congregants" (servers, busboys, cooks, regulars forlorn over their starfish and soup), when their fellows are removed to basement or kitchen or groceries, come to me, ask about a dream, confess to some anguish or other, ask what should be done or undone. I consult espresso foam, open the nearest book willy nilly to see what advice or wisdom might be gained from that Eternal Logos sustaining us all here straining after some meaningful thing to keep us going when Hart and those too recent others obey some impulse to place at last the final period, reifiying the punctuate though unrepentant ending of this too too long run-on sentence of hate. One hopes this period holds fast, that Logos/meaning is somehow, plates of starfish with fork and knife beside, true or truing, at least.

One serves where needed. And when. So come unto me you "sad young men...All the news is bad again so kiss your dreams goodbye."

Here at my confessional I can only plead mercy upon the gay boys of late who have jumped from bridges, hung themselves, cut, sliced, diced their sad and abused compulsive hands, exploded hearts, leaping dears, eyes ablaze in thrall of antlers, trembling flanks strong to fly decrying the violent hunt which always ends with a death, bequeathing these chopped bits to me and those others like me who remain at table, plates before, to stare at what is there to be later scattered, sown, those pieces in and for Love-without-name or, if named, is still a stain upon confused local deities, their wide-eyed supplicants, but there is no stain upon the promiscuous sea. The compliant sky is not confused, neither is all that is between confused, allowing birth and blessing, passing of all kinds in all manner of motive and motion. But in the human world, distressing, there will be more boys, more men growing up as from the very beginning where earliest enmity mythically grew strong before shoes, before hearts were capable of breaking before turgid theological floods spilled blood of brother by brother turning witness stones toward silence, echoing lamenting Federico:

Do not ask me to see it! I don't want to see it. I will not see it!


But I, but perhaps we, who remain to plant these petaled parts of these unwitting scapegoats whose eyes are milk now forever, we must bar sentimentality, must move toward genuine knowing which comes from the long hard stare beyond Milky Ways at the way things still inexorably are. Was it Fritz Perls who said, ''Nothing gets better (or changes for the better) until it is what it is"? But gay folk know what the "is" is of the matter...it is the others, too many of them, who don't (or won't) know, who willingly refuse to see "what is" in order to reach beyond the collective "Nazi/NOT SEE-solutions" of heteronormative culture/religion.

Perhaps even in the deepest fault of the ocean that very visionary company in league with stuporous pigeons, a mourning dove, me here who remains, not-yet-remains, tearful over my espresso looking for signs, finding only an endlessly fracturing rainbow, remembering, too, the murmuring secrets of wharves and co-mingled breath—that very visionary company traces all the sunken ones, the jumping ones, those with other means for departure by their own hands empty now of demands for love.

Here I sit with my arthritic living hands still demanding, remembering full of past and present griefs the Violin with a cut throat in a youthful suicide note I once wrote years ago, hidden, hiding out, refusing to shout my rage and despair to almighty "Nothing But":

Do not hear nothing but the cabin walls,
do not hear nothing but the late summer roses
petal by petal leaping from the still too white trellises,
leaping pinkly, redly, memory to breezes,
overwhelmed by trellises snagged with cut sleeves.

But not me. Not yet. I don't want to see it! I will not see it.


I wrote it all on the mute page—the Violin refusing to sing, in love with García Lorca, the goring horn of the Bull, the destined cornada, each and all appalling, commanding me to write during long nights working at the facility where the mentally ill wandered with me, the keys ironically in my hand, in the yellowing hallways with even more ironic EXIT signs brightly RED above the locked doors, silent companions somnolent but for the jangling joke of keys.

Still, I have now these better days in the Village, broke or near to it, with eggs and beans, cheap but edible things. An epicurean after all, I do luxuriously head to the Polish butcher shop nearby to gather meat but not any of the young butchers want to be gathered, too Catholic, for Poland is "passing strange" with bad teeth, fingers stained with nicotine. Or is it rust from cast-off Iron Curtains, or the Blood of the Acetylene Virgin?

...but back to the meat...I get my meat, cook my greens, have good-enough feasts for garlic and the right spice make grander the demanded abstemiousness of current coinage. I steal my pleasure during eats in my dirty yet happy apron with a good aria on the radio to salt my food with tears, a blubbering fool beside his one low watt lamp, darkness too too comfortable like a pooch or cat at feet. What is that bleating in the darker corner? I shall wait for daylight to see what it can be. And if I can, I shall free it from its trap and in doing so perhaps free me from all this, all this witnessing as life demands I must, of young ones setting themselves "free" because they are forced to do so by collective psychopathology now rendered even more effective and efficient via technology, via internet, emphasis upon the "net," where the ills set free from Pandora's Modem have only begun to be revealed.

But I shall use that "net" and my still goodly paper and goodly pen to dim whatever ill tides there are and to come, as they surely will in spite of low wattage. I'll jangle keys on the night watches, reading my mystic books, making my prayers with roamers of wards and wharves glancing up considering bridges, edges, silty bottoms. The tides are here even now. But right now I wish to sing a lullaby in protest to those hurting departed, even to those coming ills, that I may sing innocence dumbly back to those who may come ashore again more gently having forgotten enforcing depths insisting them toward resistant yet resolved embraces...

...So breech then, waves. Feet first. Heads in the brine. I shall keep time on your wrinkled toes sticking up from the sand, play peek-a-boo. Then while you sleep I shall harvest gently, place them firmly in that old woman's shoe with "so many children she didn't know what to do."


She may yet have learned what to by now. I haven't.

I remain bitter. Abject, too, from the senseless loss of cast off young men who could not endure the flame, the rust, no fault of their own, who leap blasted from bridges, forced by killing human edges, who are broken open within and by hateful, fearful others forgetting, if ever had, those restorative burning constancies of a Mother's loving hand upon them.

I have placed their names and images upon my altar beside García Lorca's portrait, and Hart Crane's young face, an image of a sweet Christ holding a lamb in perpetua, and the yellowed newspaper clipping from Spain of the Matador's death, all who have joined or will join Hart becoming ghostly visionary company. They now remain forever chaste not having lived long enough to be wasted, to be emptied loving deeply out into Love for more, endlessly bleeding out as Lorca, a corrida of laurel encircling his head no longer remembering but only one sound, guns exploding outward, extending, bullets, petals, one by one beyond the wall where he stood before the obedient squad stunned, "how young and handsome are the assassins' faces." Obedient to projectiles and projections he flew backward into the restraining wall, his brave shadow and blood, then fell, a last poem frozen upon lips but for circling birds, spirits, carrion or both, arriving after the blood wedding. I believe he fell hard, for life demands it as does death which will continue its duende.

Reduced to foolish whispers, restoring moments, patient hidden gods, human hearts and bodies remove themselves from the potter's wheel too early broken, too tired, too alone to try to shape love from Love from the tiny shard, the remnant bone of the ancient mastodon, the last one, dreaming within each heart of that Love which all Nature yearns for.

Inherited brood of brothers wherever you may sway remember to be gay for all the gray afternoons in this sad but forgiving confessional while not forgetting mine and the cock's quarrel with life in the booth by the cracked window near the corner of 7th and Second.


Trembling,

Nightingale

****

The Ballad of the Sad Young Men

Music written by: Tommy Wolf
Lyrics written by: Fran Landesman

(best version sung that I know of is by an aged Mabel Mercer, hard to find it now)

Sing a song of sad young men
Glasses full of rye
All the news is bad again so
Kiss your dreams goodbye

All the sad young men
Sitting in the bars
Knowing neon nights
Missing all the stars

All the sad young men
Drifting through the town
Drinking up the night
Trying not to drown

All the sad young men
Singing in the cold
Trying to forget
That they're growing old

All the sad young men
Choking on their youth 
Trying to be brave
Running from the truth

Autumn turns the leaves to gold
Slowly dies the heart
Sad young men are growing old
That's the cruelest part

All the sad young men
Seek a certain smile
Someone they can hold
For a little while

Tired little bird,
She does the best she can
Trying to be gay for
her sad young man
While the grimy moon
Blossoms up above
All the sad young men
Play at making love

Misbegotten moon
Shine for sad young men
Let your gentle light
Guide them home again

All the sad young men


**


How It Was I Came To Be What I Am - A Fable by N. Nightingale

For 'Spider' Bottas

They would argue over tides
Who bade me come into the world.
One said, Six o'clock.
The other, No, twelve.
I was born at the thirteenth hour
All the while mother arguing, 
This is not the time but a little spell, 
While father argued it was death, 
You are dying and your child, too, 
Is dying.  You have been poisoned.

It was full moon and high tide, 
The hour of birth.
All arguments yielded to the tide's.
The moon lit up the stadium 
Of their gripes while I was 
Born amidst their sweeps at
Each other, the nurse neglecting
To wipe me free of blood and salt
Being drawn into their strife.

He was born at day, one said.
No, at night, and he is a she, 
Said the other.  The nurse, 
Speaking truthfully, said, 
Cleaning me at last, No, 
You are both right.  The child
Is he and she, a hermaphrodite
Born of two days labor, its head
Out of the womb the duration.

Ruination! father cried.
Fame, mother sighed.
Both right, the nurse agreed, 
Of these fables are made. 

Then father tossed me into the sea.

The nurse saved me who later
Became my lover, hiding my 
Sexes with a four leaf clover.


**

The Little Black Boy by William Blake

My mother bore me in the southern wild
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child: 
But I am black as if bereav'd of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree 
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say. 

Look on the rising sun: there God does live 
And gives his light, and gives his heat away. 
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love, 
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.



For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear 
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice. 
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me, 
And thus I say to little English boy. 
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: 

Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, 
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. 
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.

**

3 Am Kingfisher Sonata

for V.R.Cann, 'of the Serpent born, of River's Disease'


I am, down to a man, 
the most wrestled and
creased of seasons' 
unceasing ardors.

I am established upon my worn and wagging throne. 
I remain open all night. Preponderant sinners, their 
mendicant amusements such are these fractured 
pearls, are wanton for dark bottoms, sea bed renewals, 
though for many here any bed will do - 

no work on the morrow.
 
I suffer the happy travails of indigent whithers, 
a later paramour whose eyes do what  thighs 
no longer can. Young men stray in the redder 
door and, thank god, are easily distracted, 
thank god, the erotic slights of hand, thank
god, the scented smoke, the velvet-covered 
mirrors drooping unnoticed; they depart the 
happier minds touched more than diminishing 
crescents of flesh. 

I remain a magician's 
hat, hand and arm deep, 
it's pit of cyphers ever 
grasping, so desperate 
for retrieval.
 
Still, dimming eyes skim shades, browns, 
blacks, skin shine a wonder too long stared. 
Love yet naps undisturbed, at peace in my 
admonished gaze; pastoral fold's redolent 
loam in-breathes such sleeping geography, 
it's spell, its throat tenderly bared too great 
to disturb with a hungry touch.

Eyes are wiser now allowing breaths little swallows, 
murmurs overfly nippled minarets, sinew, hair; 

salt mines below crystallize sweat beckoning 
craven tongues to aftertaste rejoinders, sweet.


Life, dear Barcelona, is sweet. 

One endures long enough to break through thunder, 
a taut belly, a smooth place for lips to land. 

One may reach a 'Pure Land' which has no logic,  
the tedious seasons of long life endured.

Still, one gathers names of each
joven* prince passed beneath loving, 
yes, arduous hands.

Again, upon Kingfisher's wings I blow these kisses, 
this music, your patient ear awaiting the purist pearl, 
for you were once the bequeathed, escaped girl 
without fear of oceans, this one between us which 
now must be overflown to reach you.

N. Nightingale, Empress of Contrails

**'young' in the Spanish tongue




Sketch by Paul Brahms.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

"Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come" - Carl Jung, Da Free John, & the Dreaded-Gomboo

"Have you got the Boo? The Dreaded? The terrible Gom? Have you? That's what I thought! Tell me true- have you got the Gom-Boo?" - Da Free John


I used to read these two paragraphs by Free John (he of many names) below (last two of this post) to students in a counseling training program...much laughter was had, but seriously serious stuff.

Now the very Free-with-his-"junk" Da-funct Da-Abi-Doot Da Da Da Whisk Broom BAH never did any personal shadow work evidenced by his scamming manipulations of others consciousnesses in his harems of followers, he was evidentially, utterly mugged by the Shadow, the archetype of Power, what Carl Jung calls "the Power Devil" such as that which/who tempted Jesus in the desert as his ministry was just beginning; Jesus resisted all the enticing "magical passes" and impressive miracles to gain power over the world where, if performed and demonstrated them, all would worship and follow him.


Free John is a glaring example, one of very, very many, entranced by those powers of archetypal psyche (very very tempting they are) so, as usual, too too often in (especially in) "spiritual" groups one or more followers ( branded as a "faction") carry the shadow of the religion, crypto-religion (alphabet soup) and mostly adulterated "sacred" techniques offered.  


[NOTE: the SHADOW WILL OUT, especially with groups that identify as "spiritual". Forewarned is four-armed (yes, FOUR armed KALI who defends and protects!!) so one will turn the volume down on naivete and "innocence" or learn all too often the hard way (Jung did point out, "God is a trauma." I add, "Live and burn. Live and learn = Blues School).]


Unlike American uber popular Spirituality LITE aka New Age, New Thought, Scions of Mind, et. al (so very "spiritually"entertaining), individuation, Carl Jung's term for addressing all dimensions of the psyche, especially the personal and collective unconscious as he lays out in his vast corpus of writing describing what he calls depth or archetypal psychology. Jungian work is NOT for the faint of heart and, importantly, it is NOT an elaborate "spiritual" entertainment (though it can easily turn into such when one accesses archetypal energies and mistakenly thinks that one has "arrived" due to "magical powers and developed psychic abilities, et. al. OY. NO. Satan's temptations to Jesus were thus such perceived to be "miraculous" powers and one must be spiritual if one can access and wield them. Clearly not so!


Thusly, an extended quote by Jung is called for here before the entertaining Free John quote which enables us, invites us each and every, one and all, to have a good healthy shadowy laugh of recognition that Da Free Junk enables us to acknowledge that, yes, we do, we all got the Dreaded Gom-boo, the Imaginary Illness that Religion Seeks to Cure (brilliant that Fra Yonks uses humor to impact us and hip us to Da D G Boo...but here's Jung (extensively. I personally do not think that it IS an imaginary (as in unreal)diseasae but is Imaginal (a la Jung and the archetypal energies mediated by the Imaginal level of the psyche):

“I am not a man, neither am I a god, a goblin, a Brahmin, a warrior, a merchant, a shudra, nor disciple of a Brahmin, nor householder, nor hermit of the forest, nor yet mendicant pilgrim:

"Awakener to Myself is my name.”(Jung, Vol.14, p.90)

" . . . One cannot be too cautious in these matters, for what with the imitative urge and a positively morbid avidity to possess themselves of outlandish feathers and deck themselves out in this exotic plumage, far too many people are misled into snatching at such “magical” ideas and applying them externally, like an ointment. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls [ψυχή, psychi, anima, animus, seele, saiwala, saiwalo, aiolos, sila, anemos, pneuma, anan, anhelare, rih, ruh, psychein, psychos, psychros, physa; Jung, Vol.8, pars. 663-664]. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth—the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better! "

Jung continues:

"I have no wish to disturb such people at their pet pursuits, but when anybody who expects to be taken seriously is deluded enough to think that I use yoga methods and yoga doctrines or that I get my patients, whenever possible, to draw mandalas for the purpose of bringing them to the “right point”—then I really must protest and tax these people with having read my writings with the most horrible inattention. The doctrine that all evil thoughts come from the heart and that the human soul is a sink of iniquity must lie deep in the marrow of their bones. Were that so, then God had made a sorry job of creation, and it were high time for us to go over to Marcion the Gnostic and depose the incompetent demiurge. Ethically, of course, it is infinitely more convenient to leave God the sole responsibility for such a Home for Idiot Children, where no one is capable of putting a spoon into his own mouth. But it is worth man’s while to take pains with himself, and he has something in his soul that can grow. It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference. (Jung, Vol.12, par.126)"

End ofJung Quote

The above views are my own, for what they're worth, from my direct experience in various flavors of "spiritual groups" (I'm done with all that now), was traumatized in and from those groups,

The wreckage in spiritual groups is part of a very old old ancient story that plays out daily in groups all kinds, secular and spiritual, with ugliness and trauma ensuing while the self-identified minister or guru or other, the leaders (a faction, as well, but they don't think so - so Danger Will Robinson, whereof the named self appointed psychopomp remains, so they think (if they fall for their own act which, actually, IS what they do) without any fault or shadow or culpa whatsoever."

If one feels compelled to partake of what is offered by guru, teacher, shaman, et. al, then best to "take the money and run" with such, critical thinking active and ON, knowing that there may be some gold to gain (teaching, etc.) while one should assume also assume that "spiritual" folks have vast amounts of "shite" too.

And shadow always gets projected back and forth.

It's all part of the Dreaded Gomboo, Incorporated in multifarious facets.

SO, here are two hilariously orienting transcribed paragraph of the Da Da Dobby Abi Doot Da Doot Da Doodle Do Doot (Lou Reed chorus chittering on in "Take a Walk on the Wild Side) for mostly Western (inheritors of Western religions and multivarious permutation) spiritual seekers:

Master Da: If you want to "get religious" in our time you must first decide that you have the Dreaded Gom-Boo. Then you go to Doctor Pope, Doctor Church, Doctor Jesus, Doctor Mahatma, Doctor Mahatmaboo, Doctor Gombooananda, Doctor Gomananda-Booharaj. As soon as you get the feeling that you have the disease, you start to look for religious answers. Ask most the people around you how they got involved with this Way of Life, and they will describe some symptom or other of the Dreaded Gom-Boo. The Dreaded Gom-Boo led you all here because you were looking to be cured of the heebie-jeebies, the hopefull Three-Day-Thumb-and-Finger Problem, the terrible jiggly meatedness! (Laughter)

Are you telling me that you think God and Truth are supposed to be interested in curing you of the Dreaded Gom-Boo? Is that it? It is about time you realized there there is no cure for the Dreaded Gom-Boo! The Gom is terrible! The Boo is terminal! And this is what you've got, right? I thought so! I could see symptoms as soon as you came in here. Have you got the Boo? The Dreaded? The terrible Gom? Have you? That's what I thought! Tell me true- have you got the Gom-Boo?"


You may read Free John's Boo book at this link:

https://archive.org/details/dreadedgombooori0000adid/mode/1up

Saturday, January 6, 2024

AVISO - BORN TO BE SCRATCHED - Brief Stray Blots on Complexes and Clotted Character, Grief Muscles, Symptoms and Symbols "Writ on the Skin" Toward Meaningful Dys-Ease

AVISO - NOTICE
[Click on images to enlarge them]

"Grief muscles. (Haz Clik)" - Charles Darwin

"A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once."  - William Faulkner

Complexes, like mules, are stubborn. They have a job to do. They form us, shape us, give us character, the word etymologically means " scratches upon a surface" thus we are all born to be scratched, scarred, and from such character is born. My tee shirt reads " BORN TO BE SCRATCHED" " BORN TO BE SCARRED". We describe landscapes and faces/bodies as " having character" and so complexes are landscapes, we are landscapes shaped by the shaping land, dirt, clay, mud, sand from which ancestral complexes were, still are, born, and borne generation to generation, person to person.

But mourning's that "thing", not hope, "with feathers", to argue with Miss Dickinson, at least this heavy-winged thing is part and parcel, tissue and fabric to my very being from earliest childhood - not playing the victim here but telling mule-ish facts, born into violence, into sorrow of mother and father at war with each other in the redneck, theologically regressive/dys-tarded primitive white south, my mythology unfolded and unfolds still though I am hard surrounded by concrete asphalt and steel where the wheel infernally drives literally everything in fabled northern island metropolis.

So, there. Etiology of my persistent skin rash begins in history, ancient history. The body, a body that I am, that I as Warren Ego inhabit, has its inexorable history and mythology genetically attributed and distrubuted cell by cell, dermis extremis, meat sack slackening but inevitable principled processes chemical and alchemical dry me out into blown-aboutness.

But I can sing. I will sing of such till I can sing no more.  
Scratch as scratch can and down to a man, or sand, 

whichever comes first or last or both, I will give voice 
and image to the hard scrap, mule-kick mother, bearing 
two mule names, who in a dream proceeding her death 
intentionally, willfully escapes my grasp via mulish jack-
ass buck-kick sends me flailing from her into the ongoing 
stretching aridity of invidious homo solitudinem -


"button, button, 
who's got the button?

how without a mother?
how without a button? - Michael Bottas 


She escapes to fauna, florae, vine-arbored densities, 
massive hedged green-green sauvage riot tangle careen 
plummet plumbs  into born anew*1 as such (or suchness?)

or so much 
underscored verdancy 
does insist hinting 

moistures,

buoyant, perfumed,

some thing beyond eye or thigh 

the weight that Forever really is 
or we feel it is, the bone feel, that 
ever-so-slow-curve calcium makes 
down, down, years of it sinking 
and then we wonder our own being's

but rumor of thunder on Distant Mountain, 
fire there, we are stutterers pegged massive 
revelations, special effects parting waters, 
walking sticks into serpents, bread rain and
and on and on and some wheres 

we remember we ought to altar so we 
relent even if it's the first and last and
only one of the heart but not only that
but the aged body parts once so primary, 
the sagging breast, the sinking 

balls, 

withered skin still the longing there and 
everywhere mere parchment now and  
how we may then finally wonder about 
religions of the Word, what gets written 
where, once and often, on stone then 
eventually vellum/skin, and bark too in 
treed lands 

So lands a Shining Stranger perhaps one of many  
bends low forever writes with his finger in the dust, 
but the word in the end may us an altar make as 
hearing fades and the tongue thinks 

"it's only water'' and 

"can a man control 'is tongue?"

- it's Biblical

the question answers itself 

a riddle: 

''never, or rarely'' 


like my mother dying, rasps

''What's this all about? 
Whatever. I'm ready to go''

as if she or any of us can really decide 
that but will's a holy thing, asserts even 
in the face of obstinate Absolute 

that "Other-Than" is also truth and down 
to a woman and man

we get to argue, 


''I decide''


Mother - Rehearsing the Bardos
September 10, 2016
She passed December 23, 2016

*

Portraits of grief muscles at work accompanying



===
Footnote:
*1 Carl Gustav Jung said that plant life is the most innocent life form.


Tuesday, January 2, 2024

The Exquisite Angelology of the Ego, The Idea of Pear Tree - Great Nature's All Our Infirmity




An overripe pear fallen from a pear tree covid19 summer 2020 
"warrentining" in New York state Adirondacks.

Archetypal psychoanalyst, astrologer, cabalist, and writer Charles Ponce's phrase "the exquisite angelology of the ego", I take from his astounding essay, "Paracelsus and the Wound", the wound being Great Nature, Her Reality, and how most of human civilization and philosophy has been efforted/designed to overcome or transcend Her, meaning finitude, decay, and death...I quote extensively here since he, Ponce, minces no words though they, like he is, are poetic, evocative, and re-orienting. And sobering. Very. A KATSU as in a zen slap meant to evoke instant clarity, what the French call, "éclaircissement" - from éclaircir (“enlighten, clarify”).

And, human, all too human, I never knew what "éclair" means but now I know and so I prefer clarity and enlightenment to be filled with "dark chocolate".

The opening few sentences are my own from my blogspot essay on Pathological Happiness (don't get me going!!):

"Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we can project some 'thing' (I like the German word for 'thing' - DING), some ding called "happiness" ('happy', meaning 'happen, luck, an eventing') but without a doubt the crushing dissolution, the decay and ending, is Nature's way, Her insistency, despite all our reification of wishful metaphysics - "for these subtleties must concretely be" we choose to believe in understandable desperation.

Ponce writes, and rights us, reorients us much and necessarily toward the ongoing immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation in each and every living ding:

...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without."
.
..A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand...the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected." 
- Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.


In a personal letter Carl Jung wrote in response to a man who was overly identified with the spiritual and had a very problematic relationship to his body, nature and the social world of work and relationships. The man had written to Jung for advice and these two lines by Jung made me laugh when I read them since I, too, have been very much like the man in the letter. I love Jung's advice which goes well with Ponce's making sense of alchemical experiments and texts:

"You barricade yourself from the world with exaggerated saviour fantasies.  
So climb down from the mountain of your humility and follow your nose."

Or snout. Sprout one if you don't got one. Slither, crouch, slouch stump and slump toward your own Bedlam-ahem and give Nature Her Due. She's gonna get it anyway.

At a crucial point in my own Jungian analysis where I very much was like the man in the letter, I had indeed, hesititatingly, painfully, begun to incarnate, own instinctually, to necessarily dis-identify with transcendence, "spirituality" (all kinds). What I needed for wholeness/hold-ness sake was what Jung calls an enantiodromia, "the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development." I was out of balance, out of Tao, and needed to land, even go underground to retrieve the wounded reptilian part of my self.

Hard work. But "dromia" happened....I dreamed of being in a dark swamp in pitch darkness far from a city which faintly glowed behind me in far off distance. I knew that I had to keep walking in the darkness, in swamp marsh, mud, thicker. Afraid? YES. But I HAD to do it. At some point I thought I saw to lights ahead of me in the distance which gave me hope and a conscious place to walk toward. As I approached closer the two lights got smaller, bright but smaller. Not a town or outskirts of one. The lights were close together and were peering! at the edge of a thicket, eyes bulging at the water surface. Terror! But the eyes were wide set apart by at least 6 feet or so. I realized that what I was walking toward was a massively large alligator, not a normal gator at all but I knew intuitively that this was "the god of Gators." Fascinated. Entranced. I decided to wake up out of the dream after this close encounter. As I was coming up out of sleep and dream I heard a voice, the voice of the GATOR speaking to me, counseling me "to step less lightly upon the world."

Much more to say but this dream put a coda to the years of incarnating, becoming human. And then the difficult work of living consciously with the alligator in an openly run by gators human world.

Theodore Roethke's poem, Infirmity, a new "scripture" for sure complements Charles Ponce's text. Much more commentary is needed when taking, as a preacher does, two texts to explicate and find a third ding, a synthesis derived from the two but no time here to do so...let Roethke have a say. I think Paracelsus and Ponce would acknowledge this poem as an alchemical text reflecting what they "have been at and about" in their incarnations:

Infirmity

In purest song one plays the constant fool
As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
I stare and stare into a deepening pool
And tell myself my image cannot die.
I love myself: that’s my one constancy.
Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;
There’s little left I care to call my own.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone;
Thus I conform to my divinity
By dying inward, like an aging tree.

The instant ages on the living eye;
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down—
The soul delights in that extremity.
Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath;
I’m son and father of my only death.

A mind too active is no mind at all;
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone;
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,
The change from dark to light of the slow moon,
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire.

Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives
I’ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill.
The great day balances upon the leaves;
My ears still hear the bird when all is still;
My soul is still my soul, and still the Son,
And knowing this, I am not yet undone.

Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,—
Eternity’s not easily come by.
When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from spirit slowly does unwind
Until we are pure spirit at the end.*

**


CODA to go with the pear —
A poem written for Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser some years back,

The "Idea of Pear Tree"

a pear tree forgets only itself as
an audacity

limbs recall themselves

appear to reach

one cannot see them
reaching

they may be silent but
we cannot know that toward
later sweetness they yearn
then seed a still dirt around

content to lie down
the idea of "pear tree"
reduces to all sparks

yet

no illusion of darknes
hastens the pear

but O it tastes