Canto Four Perebluebols Writes to the bishop

Reprise -- "Ecrites de l'Enfer"
Pere Bleubols Writes To The Bishop


God has knowledge of the opposites but not the experience of their effect. He has experienced only their peaceful unity...The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own; that to achieve consciousness and discover the nature of one's own inferiority it is at times necessary to go against one's own ego-dominated commandments.
-- Charles Ponce, Working the Soul, pgs. 68-69


Dearest Bishop D'Boue*,

Thank you for the subscription to the science journal. You are correct that I find the new science tempting and attempting whether consciously or not to come to terms with aeons of intuition that there is more to Reality and humans place within it that meets the eye or thigh...I reread your letter with great relish and with great appreciation for the tremendous patience you have with my ongoing battles 'twixt heaven and earth. This, as you know, is still the battle of all humanity caught between the animal instinctual and the rational/spiritual...

...Have been in a 'hermit' phase since the recent Trial and the Purgings...already a spiritual exile long before the Inkling Inquistors I now am more than ready to move to my own self-chosen Patmos...I am a mendicant now, without real temples to kneel in...to quote once again my beloved Rimbaud, "Ah, I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection," only the word perfection, as you know, you who bothers with the roots of all things including words, this misused word actually means complete, as in evolving in space in time, ripening like fruit, into maturity and readiness...

...I dreamed last night I was in an old European city, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, Bruges-type city, late 1800's (gas lamps in the streets)...old dark city, heavy with something or other, some spirit/zeitgeist...I was some dark powerful man/force whom the zombie/daemon/vampire-like creatures roaming the city ignored since I had some of them, their energy, in me or was partially of them (a hopeful indicator, I think, of ongoing shadow integration) which allowed me to safely deliver a mother (my mother in the dream but NOT my mother in waking reality) and her son (just-adolescent, perhaps my baby brother, about 13 y/o or so with that fuzz just beginning over the upper lip) to a "safe house" owned by a still beautiful, late mid-aged blond/graying woman of magnificent eyes and bearing. She was the widow of a powerful man and prior to whatever had befallen the City was the 'queen' matriarch of society but not superficially...she had bearing, depth, wisdom, had suffered and was suffering but bore it with dignity though with concern and pain. She looked like a combination of my late and beautiful friend, Mdm. M., who died last December, and Madame Curie and some Nordic actress or other whose name I cannot recall. I was compelled to leave having accomplished the delivery of mother and son to the safe house.

The Boschers, as I now call them after demons in Heironymous Bosche paintings, look like enfleshed gargoyles of various frightening visages and bodies. They loaded dead bodies into vaults underneath the cobbled streets...they didn't even give me much notice as I comfortably passed by them. At some point they were stacking old blown glass laboratory tubes (like from science lab equipment of late 1800's) in which a forearm or lower leg with foot attached were sealed for future feedings/experiments.

I was a tall, dark, pockmark-faced man with long flowing black hair, caped, black expensive breeches/clothes, with shiney black boots moving quickly with purpose somewhere away from the safe house. At some point I was wearing expensive running shoes/sneakers, silver in color, very designed (like a lot of contemporary sneakers the new Droogs wear now), which enables me to leap easily, almost weightlessly over barriers, up rocky hillsides, leap down from high places...my arms easily grasp tree limbs, balcony railings, bars, eaves, bricks, pipes through the city propelling me over the streets below, over rooftops, to get quickly to where I was going (of which I am not sure in the dream).

I am of the "dark side" or have enough of it consciously in me now (rather than unconsciously) to allow me to move through the city, the countryside, the continent now full of the Boschers and other daemons and vampire/zombie-like beings going about the work of science...I am to assist both sides, Boschers/other underworld beings/forces and the humans, in this difficult transition during the upsurge of the repressed chthonic underworld beings, energies, creatures (brought about by science, Freud, Jung, etc.), the repressed content of the human and collective unconscious now erupted into the once safe, secure Victorian Christian heirarchical society where church and state and high social "crust" dominated the proletariet, those earthy, instinctual, "morally lower" and mentally/spiritually inferior (or so the power and spiritual elite thought).

I suddenly realize that I left my traveling bags back at the safe house/manor which apparently had some necessary things important enough for me to quickly turn around to retrieve them. Upon entering the safe house (passing two Boschers still stacking the human flesh-filled glass tubes under the cobbled street in a vault...I picked up two tubes in passing and tossed them to the Boschers who caught them and stacked them, me helping them out as I passed) the Dame of the House, the majestic beautiful woman who once was top of the socio-political and literati/philosophical strata of the city and the nation, looked at me with concern and pain in her clear piercing blue eyes...she turned away toward some slow and heavy task and I went to my bags intent on my 'mission' whatever that was..."no time to comfort her...must move on..."

I can easily reenter this dream and continue it...it is very real...I can sense, hear, smell, feel the ambiance and the mental/spiritual air of the time and place, the city and the period it all is taking place in. I am both good and evil, conscious and unconscious, human and Boscher (partake of the underworld realm)...the post-modern sneakers, silver colored, allude to the god Mercury/Hermes who is the traveler of and between all the realms, who is criminal and saint, who plays both or all sides, who has some mission of developing consciousness which does not exclude any realm, upper, middle, lower nor values from evil to good and all between...I move swiftly, a kind of flying, earth flight, low to ground but in flight and touching the earth lightly

...a whole era/aeon is undergoing a tremendous shift and it is a troubled, troubling, dangerous, violent, reactive time...Science has unsettled the old paradigm of God on His throne running the universe with the heirarchy of good and evil and His powerful Representatives on the Earth, etc., whereas the Boschers serve the "god of Science", the Lord of this World, eating/dissecting the human body, matter, reducing matter/Mater (Mother) to objects of research and knowledge, reducing or rejecting 'spirit' and 'soul' altogether, actually repressing 'spirit' and 'soul' by reducing these to rational scientific explanations as functions of chemistry and 'laws'). I stride between and within both paradigms, old and new, more of the old where magic silver shoes can help one 'fly', where being partially of the dark forces allows one to pass unharmed, even to assist, the Boschers and other dark ones experimenting compulsively urged by the emerging zeitgeist spirit/god of science/rationality which is the 'New'...yet the 'New' foolishly, inflatedly "thinks" it is not a part of or beholden to history, the past; it hovers, if you will, born like Athena from the head of Zeus, without mother, without history, full blown/full formed with no moral obligation to history, to matter/Mater including humans or Nature...Nature is reduced to an 'it' to be crafted to serve only the human will/ego...but the Boschers are driven compulsively to have what humans have, capacities for consciousness, emotions, subtleties, spirit, empathy as yet unable to fully integrate/embody these human things...

And your letter with the subscription to the Science Journal open a deep[er door to the scientific realm at least 100 or more years ahead of where my dream has me, late 1800's, as the European civilization begins Its outward decay/decline with the release of the unrepressed instincts and shadow surges up in individuals, cultures, nations, continents...all this the necesary antecedent to new consciousness incorporating past and the 'new'...

My gargoyle self in now fleshed out and moving in this dream...his mission? help the mother and the son, the Dame of the House, AND also assist the Boschers/dark ones in and through this transition, these rough beasts "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born" (W.B. Yeats in his poem, 'The Second Coming').

Synchronistically, while sitting at the Cafe Rue de Repos rereading your letter today, writing, reading, amplifying the dream, watching it unfold imaginally, writing it all down, an old still elegant though faded Victoria LTD automobile parks right in front of me, old world splendour of a car, large, cadillac-like, jaded copper/gold color green tinged--that verdigris "micturation of metals" that the alchemists speak of. The man driving it got out and I was shocked to see an older version of the tale dark man who was me in the dream, complete with badly scarred/pocked face, thick dark brown hair pulled back into a pony tale. He wore black boots, black jeans, dark brown shirt and a gold embroidered vest (having an Eastern European/romani flare to the design)...he looked part native american and part Romani/gypsy...I noticed on the large dashboard in the car interior were two black and white European-style images of the Our Mother (not the Virgin of Guadalupe whom you know I adore) along with what appeared to be a sacred card with a red felt frame around a red-lettered/printed prayer.

The driver went to his car trunk, opened it revealing full bags, unpacked scattered clothes, and a bottle of red wine, an Italian vintage whose label I recognized, inexpensive but sufficient for a boiled potato meal, or something like that...he fished a coat out of a rag heap, closed the trunk, put it on then reopened the trunk to adjust the wine bottle further into the rags, clothes and papers (so as not to break from the closing trunk?)...he walks away...watching all this the hair is standing on my arms and my neck is all prickly...this is too too passing strange...he looks just like the man in the dream who is 'me' only maybe 10 or 15 years old, my age now, late 50's/early 60's, but large, in good shape but for a bit of a middle-aged stomach and hips but barrel chested and strong with a powerful aura like a medicine man or wizard where Rasputin meets the Righteous Reaper and the Dear Savior, sharp clear eyes, shining...

I tried to see the car tags as he later pulled away but looked up too late from my writing to be able to make out where he is from...Canada? Wisconsin? Couldn't make it out...damn. I half expected to find him parked in front of my quarters in the church yard upon return home. Not.

This dreams seals it...there is now no wonder why I could no longer be in the Enclave d'Esprit Spirale which inflatedly thinks it can be "all Light", naively spiritualizng Nature and the Chthonic forces of which I believe the Boschers represent in the dreaml. To what purpose can I turn or guide, if at all, the Boschers and other related 'ill-k"? Who leads all this if it is One Entity at all? or some greater force partaking of Dark and Light, some Archon, some Entelechy experimenting, forcing, thrusting, using human consciousness to what purpose which moves manipulatingly through what humans call "Good" and "Evil"...we personify the Powers/Archetypes but these ultimately defy such personifications which are images and embodiments, hints and conjectures with hiccoughs of their work/way/will under the push of the Force...

...In this dream I leap from hill to roof to cliff to church ledge equally at home in the boulevard and the hedge, the city and the valley creche (cradle), the height and the hole; I feel something for the mother, her son, the Dame, the human bits and parts parceled and packed, parked under the cobbled streets but the feeling/emotion is remote and subject to the detached overview and perspective of larger Vision/Mission--Impersonal Forces are at work in the World, in humans, too, almost especially so, therefore sentimentality is dangerous though compassion is not although I cannot stop to comfort or explain (if I know at all) what is going on and wherefore to the Dame of the Manor. I must to my bags then swiftly fly off to some as yet to be known by me the dreamer though the dream Bluebols knows or at least intuitively leans toward the place, destination, further mission...

To be continued. Must be noted that the dream Bluebols was not inflated, not full of himself at all though he strode with magnificent confidence, authority, power and assurity through the city and the world. There was no question as to right to exist, purpose, no 'moral confusion' but a sense of ethical obligation to the Forces and the creatures born of such, human and otherwise, a mediary between what appear to be opposing worlds/energies, the Opposites Jung wrote so much about.

Please accept my gratitude along with my apologies for sending you all this and taking up so much of your time. It aids me so to know you are constantly present to receive my rantings, my prayers, my quandaries with such equanimity and genuine interest. I am forever indebted and grateful.

Yours humbly,

Pere BB

* Boue means mud in French

REPRISE: What Is Known Is Variable And Dependent Upon Available Light - Instants Upon The Approaching Night

12/22/12 2:43 p.m. - Original publication date

Little Warren, asquint in sun, 

unintentional clown face 

permanently stuck in place

 

"I am old enough now to realize we are all trying to live sufficiently long to see the self come true.  None of us is likely to make it.  Therefore we invent selves, we prance and pose and dream and labor, confirming what we might be by what others think we are and by what we see we have been."  - Dave Smith, "A Secret You Can't Break Free

"We go towards something that is not yet, and we come from something that is no more. We are what we are by what we came from. We have a beginning as we have an end. There was a time that was not our time. We hear of it from those who are older than we; we read about it in history books...It is hard for us to imagine our 'being-no-more.' It is equally difficult to imagine our 'being-not-yet'. " - Paul Tillich

That place among the rocks--Is is a cave,
Or a winding path?  The edge is what I have. - Theodore Roethke"

I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge,"’ writes Buber. ‘I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.’ (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul, 1947] p.184). Perhaps no other phrase so aptly characterizes the quality and significance of Martin Buber’s life and thought as this one of the ‘narrow ridge.’ It expresses not only the ‘holy insecurity’ of his existentialist philosophy but also the ‘I-Thou,’ or dialogical, philosophy which he has formulated as a genuine third alternative to the insistent either-or’s of our age. Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ is no ‘happy middle’ which ignores the reality of paradox and contradiction in order to escape from the suffering they produce. It is rather a paradoxical unity of what one usually understands only as alternatives -- I and Thou, love and justice, dependence and freedom, the love of God and the fear of God, passion and direction, good and evil, unity and duality." -- from Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S. Friedman (online book: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=459&C=371)

"The narrow ridge is the place where I and Thou meet," he [Buber] added. When I asked him to clarify this symbolism to me, he replied...'If you like, you can think of the narrow ridge as a region within yourself where you cannot be touched. Because there you have found yourself: and so you are not vulnerable."

"I have already said that every Thou in our life is doomed to become and It, a thing. The man or Woman whom we love, whom we seek to fulfil totally, becomes a given imperfect person with a known nature and quality. A young medical student dreams passionately of curing suffering humanity. Then he becomes a doctor in a crowded hospital with pressure, with not enough time to devote to every patient. And the suffering humans become objects. They recede to the world of the It. This is the tragedy of being human. And in order to avoid losing the I-Thou we must take our stand on the narrow ridge, as a company of soldiers takes up its position on an embattled hill and says, From here we shall not retreat!"

"And, as you have asked me for a clearer definition, I will say, the narrow ridge is the meeting place of the We. This is where man can meet man in community. And only men are who are capable of truly saying "Thou" to another can truly say "We" with one another. If each guards the narrow ridge within himself and keeps it intact, this meeting can take place."
-- pg. 69-70, from Encounter With Martin Buber, by Aubrey Hodes, Penguin Books, 1972


"Religion could be called “Meaning and Belonging, Incorporated...There is a need for thoughtful people to make some discriminations between and within religious groups -- to look for curing impulses that are latent in the faiths that so easily can spread disease." - Martin Marty, from "Religious Cause, Religious Cure"

1971 - Christian college days/dazed, but

trying, not succeeding, "don't try to hard"

was counseled then, but was no comfort

I'm holding a kid from downtown Chat.

TN. at a crowded concert at the college.

The day before I moved to New York City after being kicked out of North Carolina by the Blue Ridge mountains Greybeard, Looking Glass, Shining Rock, Chimney Rock, the diminutive Huckleberry, the myopic Lookout and Height Enough, and from over the border in South Carolina, the mountain of my childhood, Roper, which swallowed Wickerbill the best hunting dog in the world ever in its red clay maw, thus was confirmed my non-negotiable eviction. One does not argue with mountains especially when they are right. I was broken, a miasmic meanderer along cone-strewn hiking trails flailing loudly at schist, thrusts of snowy quartz and invisible judges, those hold over Puritans still adamantly flinging hell and grace thickly about and I eventually came undone, psychologically wasted, pooped, popped, in what is nowadays called a state of "spiritual emergency."  I had been reduced by these Buckle Toes - a friend's moniker for the self-appointed heavily-godded Christian ones spreading/spewing forth projections and hatred from Salem over the homeland to even a mountain in Tennessee.  Rather than being an obedient follower I apparently only excelled at flunking  "bleat" - deacon, sanyasin, chela, devotee, all the 'spiritual diminutives' related to being a 'lowly follower.'   I was also most morose over not being able to get one, ye gods and little fishes, just one good poem written. Never mind the usual common-to-everyone maladies, the maladjusted scraps and scrambles of human relationships bungled, mangled in all flavors of tango and tangle, and the immense social pressure to conform to group mind and coercions which as Jung says "are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics."  And hysteria.  Thus Salem.  Thus New Age circle jerks.  Thus, alas, myself, jerker and berserker in chief.


All this and more bored even the solitude of patient mountains, their constancy challenged by my morass on the moraine. the harlequin heart-staggers - a prideful statement but it must be said to make a point: I felt at the time as an absolute truth that I could sway even the mountains where pre-eviction I hermit-ed in rhododendron-wrapped prison walls of books and empty wine bottles. Each book, each bottle, a prayer to the "God who was supposedly there" but I never saw Him or, rather, occasionally caught an almost indisputable glimpse but could not give a good description of Him to the God Protectors, the Infidel Police, since my description or approximation (which they ALL really are, right?) did not match their True God profile and fingerprints codified in The Book, their reserving all rights and authority about what is True and not True about the Almighty's apparitions and whereabouts, "Nope, sonny boy...not Him"...apparently I had only misperceived something out of the corner of my thigh mistaken for merriment most forbidden. I was with Nietzsche by then, "I can never worship a god who didn't dance." I had tried all my youth long to worship a barnacled-pier God. But no more. Dance I did in the mountain glades and trails when the travails of mind did not so much prevail upon. But even in travail the dances continued. Silent. Heavy. The nearby stream promiscuously offering it's massive wet stones as my dance partners.

And I broke my back lifting God to heaven.

This God of the Magician's Hat - now you see Him, now you don't - revealed Himself most to me via Meister Eckhart's Via Negativa which remains the natural way of my soul's stumble through wilderness stretches and wine wretches, instantly spiritually orienting on the knees shouting "please please" to tree limbs, what they perpetually pointed to always swaying swaying. Barring remote spiritual cures and pathetic prayer the "Hair of the Wickerbill" served - a triple Alka Seltzer shot with a local "moon" chaser, a homeopathic remedy derived from ghostly hidden fires, copper spirits coiling alchemically in night tree tops (now pointing downward) easily mistaken for Moon shyness, never mind the lead and rust infused. After those wasted moments I recovered on the front porch with bitter espresso, some Gregorian chant wafting through the screen door, a car battery powering the record player stacked with chants and such to soothe the burning stomach, the shaking hands, a view of the apple orchard in the valley below, an old cedar in the sloping yard just a few yards ahead made of once were two saplings which had early entwined, now-years-wound, creaking into one massive trunk, such a groan it made with the high wind crushing shrilly down from Mount Mitchell's dark hover behind the hut, or valley gales rushing up from fallen apples and Barron's Creek to my perch settled in without electricity, the cedar's drone become a home to nestle a sore head upon and within; therein I turned to Chinese poets of old to savor, one now a thoughtful lifelong companion through all cycles so far lived, Liu Tsung-yuan (773 - 819), a human homing device, an in-the-moment course correction when intercourse with the world, and my pitiable self, was just too too much to bear. Old Liu would lift me out of pathetic self muck, gather my scattered bones from the sandy bottom by the creek as he did the bones of old Heng the hired hand whose name means "persevering," and orient me toward the western woods, "I only wish for fine wine and friends who will often help me pour. Now that spring is drawing to a close and peach and plum produce abundant shade and far, far, the homeward goose cries, I step outside, greeting those I love, and climb to the western woods with the aid of my staff. Singing out loud is enough to cheer me up; the ancient hymns have overtones."

On the edge over the bee-loud Blue Ridge valley all apples and manure shining flashing of green-tailed flies, before further exile, I escaped nightly to work, late ward sits as an attendant at the local psychiatric hospital, wee hours reading Hopkins, Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Berryman, Roethke, many other poets of the world who like Liu Tsung-yuan turned woes into ancient hymns and overtones. After one fateful graveyard shift all night reading Basho Matsuo's Narrow Road to the Deep North, in dawn's hut I begot to stumble-bed visions of pagodas and temples, fog-draped mountain passes, high peaks - names like Dismal Crouch and Turn Around Fool - spare anthems, such are haiku, of chrysanthemums in my head 8 a.m - "chysanthemum" means "golden flower," "gold" = chrysos, and "anthemum" = "flower" which, by the way, "anthemum" holds within it an "anthem" - with such a mind full I dreamed a Great Mountain's voice shouting, "Go away!" and that was enough for me. Where I'm not wanted I don't stay so I made plans to flee. I followed my exiled self into further exile, Deep North, a symbolic defiant suicide-by-New-York-City.

Someone or some malformed thing in me had to go, to flower-wither, to summarily croak, so plans were made whence and whither, lodgings arranged, Harlem 1980, Koch era, the internal wilderness wander further ensuing urbanly hardcore, Basho's book in my coat pocket just in case I needed a reminding map, in upper-upper Manhattan where mad Garcia Lorca once fled the sorrowful fountains of Spain to roam awhile before his return to yellow feathered assasins and an invisible grave, "some say the crime was in Granada" :

Friends, carve a monument 
out of dream stone 
for the poet in the Alhambra, 
over a fountain where the grieving water 
shall say forever: 
The crime was in Granada, his Granada. 

 - Antonio Machado, from "The Crime Was In Granada"

 I was enchanted like Lorca by old bricks squalid beauty, each a story told, a private gesture open to witness, mud memory mute and chrysos, sonambulant subway pitching interminably forward, graffiti scrawls clutching after a bit of fame or notoriety into what was still a pandemonium most pentecostal long ranting after dark, jazz, salsa, merengue nights gore and glory dispatched from cars, windows, stoops, sidewalks, "Thriller" and Tina Turner's question "what's love got tah do with it" my new enforced mountain-exile meditation - children's play, all ages, 3 a.m. hydrant fountains bodies hot hard in lamp glow orange apocalypse by river curl following apparitions native barks and Dutch long ships sails-full passing West 142nd, blocks south looms Cathedral Divine Saint John's hang, just beyond reach of workers, trabajadores, immigrant occupants who north of 116th street earnestly try to migrate joys few coins rolling in gutters, millions passed and passing by overlooking the Christ, hungry abject crowds, slogging for the American dream,

"I have the money and can pay for the past." - Richard Hugo

Wasn't all this redeemed/revalued a long Palestine ago? The crysos of Church and churches remains more that of fools and not of the Christos. There's much to blame. Still, I'm a gargoyle perched-a-ledge mis-churched and worn, God of the Western and American world stuck in my craw, a lightning bolt bolted to my left paw beside near-dead Aquinas-Saint about himself/his work lifelong, the Summa and more - the Church more in mind and himself in terms of the real value of all his theologizing - "All straw! All straw!" For this reason though, post-Christian, pre-Manhattan, I had hid, nay, sequestered mad-enough in mountains tall, stalled, a being-not-yet. Bequestered and confundidated. Hiding out in Nature's beauty was all I then could do. So I waited for Mister Godot. Until He showed up, a cheap bordeaux would do. And reading the nights slowly through.

Till the "Go way" notice came.

The Sorrow and the Pretty

All this the above said may make me sound like I was a bad-ass but that's not true. Irreverent, yes.  And bluster. Bluster counts here as disguise for I was pretty.  Not handsome.  Prettiness counts for much in youth, in older age it is (sadly) sacrificed for Beauty..  A necessary assault in order to grow wise.  Wisdom comes from loss and blood, always of the Moon.. Even gorgeous buds must go.  Nature says it so.  And we can and should protest their going but in older age one loses energy to fight so gives in to what is "just so." In sorrow sore, in broken mendicant hearts, having touched tenderly and tasted the binding buds, wisdom is born.  

But pretty boys make for an awful confusion amongst men, a real trouble, and, yes, violence verily.  Men like pretty in their women but find it most disturbing in boys and young men. Then Golden Flowers are crushed, "righteously" so.  Chapter and Verse.  Sanctified wrath against sublime wraiths-most-lovely wars and destoys. It is by polite and holy society "of the male born" considered a duty harsh, justified, manly and rushed, that the feminine is preserved and men are saved from tempting male beauty.  

In most forbearing mountains thus I hid my blushing pretty at war with myself (having internalized the Christian cultural fulminant Funda-fomentalism).  But one must not in mountain world surpass even their beauty, or their pretty.  They win such wars by time which wears down flesh and minds. Respectful of this then, and gladly, while in their secure embrace, I cultivated both god and verse hunkering down in remote cabin shade. There I braved the pretty and the beautiful by day - the bluet, the rhododendron, the trillium, the mountain laurel - to boldly reveal them ahead of  the inexorable shadows that mountains make because that one and only golden Sun, ours, flowers only-danced in shortened pretty skies bluet-blue, because those who know mountains true know that valleys are king and sunlight is brief tip to top, and in the between-brief span brightness stops both Sun and seer mid-afternoons. 

And obedient, some of us, the pretty ones (then),  to the sheltering darkness get. Much may be done between 10 a.m and 4 but then shuts the revelation door,  the valley/the veil resumes its reign. There both pretty and beauty pander to stained human palettes painfully returning as did I to fire or bulb light for all Beauty burns away to shadow (only in memory Beauty stays).  One develops night vision to see it.  Thus did I work the night surrounded by others tears, lost their pretty selves the youths of wards and afterwards, and also those in tenements the old, the homeless Good Will-ed, for such now my verse is bestowal most holy gentle upon their sleeping faces, chrysanthemums each a pretty a beauty, black buds made mad with themselves the blunted social world could not contain. 

Toward "Being-Not-Yet" A Mountain Self Is Reborn

One more day in Carolina before leaving the spurnful mounts, Tillich's "being-no-more" chased hotly from behind pushing me compellingly toward "being-not-yet," I gathered myself inwardly for the journey with a friend, Asa, a missionary kid who grew up in South Korea.  He was newly married to a woman named Dahlia who, too, had grown up in Korea, also a missionary kid.  Asa was living in Dahlia's family home where they were both taking care of her grandmother who had spent her entire life as a missionary in Korea until retiring to the North Carolina village mostly occupied by retired missionaries and ministers of her particular denomination.

Grandmother, in advanced old age, a hundred years old, was beginning to "lose it" mentally.  Her room was a dark one, small, cramped, musty with old yet well cared for black lacquered chests from Korea. Exquisitely designed, balanced, ornate but not precious, these ornaments were shining presences from an era of the Hermit Kingdom now rapidly receding into the past yet resonate and alive in the dark space that grandmother's long, richly occupied and fruitful life was now confined to.  A small window with a single homemade faded curtain, white, obviously hand sewn Korean lace delicate at the bottom hem, was, too, darkened by the mountain hill within arm's reach just outside the house perched high on a severe grade of the house-resistant mountainside, perhaps a symbol of the immense effort needed to transplant an alien religion in Korean native soil which somehow took root, held on, and now flourishes in the southern half of the Korean peninsula. 

The drive to Manhattan would begin very early in the morning with Asa bound to see a brother living in Harlem, a Korean Studies student with a Korean wife, many of her family living there as well in the renovated brownstone near the Hudson.  This was to be my home for six years.  Totally other cultural immersion.  In Harlem at that. Suicide by New York, indeed.  Just what I needed.

I rested in the small guest room beside grandmother's.  Asa would touch my door all too early so I retired to bed earlier than usual in order to get up in the pre-dawn for the long drive north.  Sleepily writing in my journal, reading Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot which had become my "Bible," a post-Christian guide in mine own "dark night," I would soon hear Dahlia enter grandmother's room.  Grandmother will have called out in her frail voice, a voice laced as the curtain hem was laced, a voice hanging in dimmed stillness at the top of the stair, traces of an old order still alive in a voice woven with manners and bearing of a gracious Southern woman who had managed to live an most unusual life, a non-traditional life, a life that most Southern white women were not allowed to live, indeed dared not live nor, frankly, cared to as it was a life of hardship, alienation, determination built upon steely will and Biblical vision, dependent totally upon Holy Spirit and spit. And palpable grace.

Times enough that that grace seemed to be muted, remote in what was perceived as obstinate darkness of minds, "pagan" minds to be harvested for God's kingdom but rejecting or at least strongly resisting that unsought for and proffered missionary grace. Still, grace was present as anchoring thought often unfelt/unseen and thus was clung tightly to in underscored and memorized Bible passages, desperate/obstinate/woeful/hopeful knees-worn prayer, and a growing steely capacity, a sure sign of grace and adaptation, for living in the absurd contradiction and presumption needed to impose an alien belief system sincerely believed in native  inhabitants who owned their own spiritual soil, a people content enough with their own root belief systems formed of their local earth, river, sea, sky, history, their unique soul and spirit inherent in whatever combinations of all these elements and more which make a people and a nation, whose religions are containers of their ultimate values and concerns. When the first missionaries arrived disease and poverty were rampant. Of such is a soil made ready - and also souls care-worn and hard laboring against regressive forces of nature and overweening foreign power usurping land and leadership - for strange nurture bearing strange fruit but barely, tree by tree, so please the patient Fructive Power.

Spirit-seed, new stuff, no matter how foreign and other in earthern veils variant, can adopt, take root, then adapt and uniquely grow though that original seed has been altered by the old indigenous gods/seeds. And the missionaries, too, are worked-upon within and by the land and culture they pilgrim-roam preaching through becoming more like the new soil and soul that they've transplanted themselves upon.  As one religion professor once told me, "In the history of religions, when an old religion transplants itself in a new land with its own religions and gods, within a generation or two the old gods have their way with the new ones and the new ones, too, are transformed."  And so religion wags on.

Grandmother politely called finally out, "Dear? Dear? o Deeaaarrrr?"  a lilting child's singsong, a voice of charm endearing the heart.  Upon the hearing I was struck by a deep resonant and somehow reverant (almost wrote "revenant") sadness.  A natural sadness. Of the end of the road, the end of a toiling-for-the-Kingdom life, of having pursued and been pursued by a profound sense of calling, of mission, new seeds in an old soil made of all common and excruciating givens which form human suffering, the patient (and impatient) yearning toward immediate surcease as well as hopeful increase of one's own children and the generations to come. For grandmother, having "run her God's race," the finish-line human and divine was near, dire, but tinged with the smoke of Pentecostal fire now dampered down in her to simple kindnesses bestowed in gentle smiles, a soft yet ripened presence atop a stair in a dwelling hard-pressed into an begrudging mountain.

 

I, on the other hand, had no clear sense of calling or mission.  For me was only a gripping desire and devotion, a lifelong draw toward the arts, toward writing, toward poetry, which would thus redeem my existence from the mundane failures of being "human, all too human."  If like Eliot, like Lorca, like Rilke and so many others, I could follow "the draw" and sew a hem of words for the window soul of some single reader in need of companionship and presence, of revelation, even if only that image mundane of  dancing dust "caught" in a shaft of sunlight (Eliot's image) then that would be satisfaction enough for me in my own "craft and sullen art" outborne, "Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages / And the lovers lie abed" (Dylan Thomas), a grandmother patiently dying in her own vision bed of an older time 2000 years followed/lived and lived out into a personal harvest nigh..

I heard the young granddaughter's feet upon the old stairs as she ascended to attend to frail grandmother's beseeching in a voice a century old.  I listened in the dark, the mountain's palpable gloom in my small window, too,  matching the darkness within myself having lost available light but for that orienting flicker of Eliot's Quartets and a blear smear in the coming dawn toward the American northeast whose bricks and steal I would soon enough founder upon, stalled again. Apalled.  Yet enthralled by the spanses of bridges spiring horizontally over rivers which below carved spaces their own like those manmade above - out from mountains and beside rivers could I enter those spaces of shapely air and be at last reborn? 

I then heard the tender door-knock, the muted creak of an opening, a soft entrance into the ruminate room, "I'm here, grandmother. Here I am. Your Dahlia. What may I do for you, dear?" Silence. "How may I be of help to you before eventide and slumber?"

What world had I been so fortunate to stumble into to hear such eloquence voiced from a genteel time passed on in inherited speech to a granddaughter just launching into her own young life of vision and fire?

Silence.  Then frail, polite, a voice, the voice of bearing, of manners, of divine mission heeded, obeyed, answered, done, responded, "I need to know, Sweetness, do please tell.  Is your handsome Asa doing a beautiful thing?  Is he? Is he doing a most beautiful thing?"

Stunned. 

A beautiful thing? a most beautiful thing?  a doing of beauty or beauty in the doing?  Deep emotion sudden-rushes up from remote recesses within me, lifegiving waters up and outspring, so much so that I wrack, wrecked, sob unrestrained into a pillow infolded in a delicate handmade Korean pillowcase too perfect and silken for my rough, irreverent,  indelicate American tears. Here was a reversal of mission fields, Korean pillow-grace receiving torrent tears,  a post-Christian son of the South's "Christ-haunted landscape," sheening darkly wet, outlines shown upon silk, blindsided by unexpected flash..

Available light.  More than available light.  Grace sear and sheer.  Surprising.  Invasive.  Breakthrough hard layers, years accretions, fortress fears against inner and outer longing, aspiring, failing, "Jesu" greatly desiring, but unsaid, unstated, unseen but intuited, felt, not known, suddenly collapsing within and crumbling down upon a gentle question innocently, earnestly, asked,

Is Warren doing a beautiful thing?  Is HE doing a most beautiful thing?

This question then (and now) was (is) more than orienting.  Immediately upon hearing it Vocation was finally named, attained and mine.  From a dying grandmother who was dead within weeks of my arrival in New York, whose legacy to me and, I'm sure, many, is Beauty, "a beautiful thing,"  a doing of beauty.  I keep repeating this now to remind me in this Advent season verging on the personal advent of my official and all too real old age, the need to keep being awed, and doing, for grandmother, lovers and loves, for, as the Buddhists say, "all sentient beings," and as the Psalmist says, "all creatures great and small," as the Cristos says, "for the least of these...the last shall be first," and as Dylan Thomas circumscribes the doing for those "human, all too human" all and awe, "With all their griefs in their arms,/I labour by singing light/Not for ambition or bread/Or the strut and trade of charms/On the ivory stages/But for the common wages/Of their most secret heart."

And secret no longer, it is Beauty pursues me.  Beautiful things. The doing of them.

It is Beauty then, a containing event, a force, a hint, where all things, good, evil, the gray and in between, and always fragmenting things, the frailty and the reforming of what remains even if just another slant of light casting shard moments in ways that are revelation, revealing Beauty's doing - it is then both perceiver and that which is perceived together comprise a witnessed thing most fine and consonant (even if plain by daily eyes/ears) hitherto unseen/unheard or non-existent but born from the union of the knower and the known, and born even from known me, the useless one, the lazy one (my father's voice) trailing books, words, misused and broken relationships, wary of people-as-paths, the pricks and pieces, all promises of things sucked dry to skins, my skin now, o thin thin. Yet singing.

One framing question and a cosmos is created then.  Out of darkness, light.  God, I believe, still speaks worlds into being.  And what is uttered is a question, a question of "Beauty's doing" and that hidden "Self" of and in matter within matter not-yet-fully-mattered sudden startle-bursts into grateful, stunned existence resonating, breaking things into further opening, unveiling, yielding, God-question quakes into trembling, yielding revelators.

And trembling, finite, we, revelators all, return to solidity as gift. Our being in finity. And God sees that which is created and declares (surprised, too, and known newly by what is perceived and responding, gazing, speaking back), "It is good."

Pressed against a mountain steep in a hamlet of august Presbyterians Calvin-severe, many of them returned from the Hermit Kingdom driven there and back by King James Word fires, conjurers of a Shining Stranger's irresistable Grace, I find myself alien and broken there again upon a silk pillow in tears, "a word, a question, fitly spoken" wringing forth one odd salvation managed for even me in the narrowing Carolina valley of what then was a yet to be lived and uttered life beholden to a first bridge, a dying gracious lady, a grandmother questioning and in that question a new being come in from Kingdom exile newly standing in kind and canyon light, Evocation leading to Vocation. 

And Beauty is the Name derived from both depth and height.

What is known is variable and dependent upon available light.

[All photographs in this essay are by Warren Falcon.  

Footnotes in asterisks:

Of Toxic Oneness and the God of Gators - Reorientation Assisted by Edward F. Edinger's Jungian Input

Lady Liberty out in the Bay signalling despite more

than bluured chaos of divided waters, some rough, 

some smooth in after dusk city glow.  

Regarding toxic oneness I begin with a dream of duality given account of by Jungian analyst, Dr. Edward Edinger:

"The wine of Dionysus shares with the blood of Christ the qualities of reconciliation and communion. The dream of a young minister, which came to my attention, illustrates this point strikingly:

"Dream (abbreviated): I am to celebrate communion. In the sacristy, which looks like a kitchen, the communion wine is to be prepared by mixing two separate wines--a dark blue wine and a red wine. The latter is a bottle with a yellow label that looks like a Scotch label and is marked "Paul". At a round table, two men are sitting. One is a political leftist, the other a rightest. Up to now they have maintained a facade of social amenity but now they are becoming hostile to one another. I suggest that they ventilate at the gut level and resolve their feeling relationship. At this point the scene darkens as in a theater play and a red-yellow spotlight focuses on a small table between and behind the two men. On the table is a bottle of the warm red wine with the Scotch label clearly marked "Paul." Then there is total darkness and the tinkle of glasses, sounding as though they've been clinked and perhaps broken. The sense is obvious in the dream. I think: they've drunk the red wine in their discussion, attained comradeship, became drunk and in the process, fallen asleep and dropped their glasses. My response is delight in the aesthetic way this has been portrayed and anxiety about the fact that the service needs to begin and we do not now have the ingredients for the communion mixture."

"This dream presents the interesting image of two wines--a blue one and a red one--perhaps symbolizing spirits of Logos and Eros. It shows that the dreamer has achieved a "lesser coniunctio", meaning marriage, a reconciliation with the shadow, but the "greater coniunctio" signified by the full communion service with both wines is not yet ready to take place.

"Regressive dissolution and conscious reconciliation of differences are sometimes confused or contaminated with one another. The blood or wine of Christ or Dionysus can cause either."

-Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype, The Religious Function of the Psyche", pg. 248-249

In Edinger's book, Anatomy of the Psyche, Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, pgs. 66-67, he reports the same dream and comments:

"The dreamer's psychology is not known to me in depth; however, it is evident that Dionysian and Christian symbolism are here combined. Although the union of the two wines—perhaps Logos and Eros—remains to be achieved, a solutio [the alchemical process of dissolving solids into liquid form] has occurred that dissolves the opposition between leftist and rightest, although at the price of consciousness since they fall asleep. In this case, as is often true, there is a confusion between authentic reconciliation of opposites though greater consciousness and a regressive dissolution which blues awareness of the opposites."

Ego and Archetype was published in the early 1970's. Since Edinger's books are largely drawn from his analystical practice, lectures and Jungian training seminars, one can assume that the dream reported above occurred in the 1960's, a volatile time of war and political unrest attempting to bring about a collective coniunctio of racial, gender, political and regional opposites, of "red states" and "blue states" though these attributions of colors to politically affiliated U.S. states was not then used. This fact makes the dream even more interesting as it heralds the use of "red states"/"blue states" currently in use.

Although a political "solutio" apparently occurred in the Civil Rights Act of the 1960's, and long, too long overdue, an authentic psychosocial coniunctio has yet to be achieved in the "land of the free". It can be historically argued that for all the lauding of the American democratic "melting pot" (coniunctio language and imagery) the authentic coniunctio Edinger refers to in the dream above has not yet occurred though it is "written" on paper in the U.S. Constitution. As the dream suggests, authentic reconciliation of the opposites (the both coniuntios, lesser and greater) are hardly ever achieved personally much less socially/collectively.

Given the recent resurgence nationally of unrepentant racism, regionalism and pathological patriotism with fanatical religious tints, the theater lights, to borrow from the dream image above, are turned up bright upon stage and auditorium illuminating sleeping actors and audience, both unconscious for it is a terribly humbling and at times humiliating thing to confront one's own unconsciousness and personal shadow. Easy platitudes and gestures of reconciliation, wishful statements of "oneness" and even the pietistic/patriotic mouthing of truths as yet to be understood much less integrated "that all men are created equal", may and do create momentary emotional states of "oneness" (as wine does reduced to sincere though mawkish sentimentality--and America is one of the most sentimental of collectives moving from one addictive sentiment to the other but without depth of feeling matched/mated with insight and integration) but are reduced to glibness and hollow repetition unable to disguise real reptilian/primitive instincts perceiving the red or the blue as a threat and acting accordingly but with self-righteous, Bible and flag-draped "authority" attached to murderous, separating intentions.

Each individual must confront the reptile, the lizard within and rather than take it to "the theater", costume it in angelic robes, wipe its ass with sweet unguents and spraying perfume all around (cosmetics-are-us) one must like Job see the chthonic dark side of not only self but of God. Jung's as yet to be assimilated much less understood intuition that in integrating our own opposites we are integrating those of our gods points us to do our own inner work which is more likely to create authentic cultural change than all the extroverted acts in the world.

In another Edinger book, The Psyche In Antiquity, Vol. One, in the chapter on Mani, the originator of Manicheanism, an account is given from Manichean texts of the battle between the "sons of light" (Light = all good) and the "sons of darkness (Dark = all evil). The sons of light are defeated in a cosmic battle of good and evil. In the tricksterish image of authentic psyche which votes for neither good or evil, light or dark, but accepts and contains both, the sons of darkness as victors eat the sons of light. In so eating the sons of light the sons of darkness are contaminated by the sons of Light and are therefore made less evil! Edinger astutely (and relievedly) points out that one is "perfected" (etymologically, perfection means "complete" as is in ripening which implies a process of maturing in space and time) not by imitating the sons of Light, curtsying to one another with a "peace and blessings" and a "namaste", but by consciously "eating" assimilating (or at least struggling) both dark and light. Becoming identified or identifying others as either does not "perfect" or mature/develop ripen an individual or culture.

To repeat in order to stress the problem of evil is not resolved (solutio-ed) by identity with either side of the opposites but by tolerating the tension between the opposites; the image of Christ in the middle of the vertical and horizontal poles of the cross depicts this suspension and meaningful suffering which leads to the reconciling third image of resurrection which is not an ascension into all good and Light (this is clearly depicted in the imagery of the Book of Revelations where Christ-once-the-Lamb-of-God returns apocalyptically as the Avenging Ram of God exacting vengeance upon "evil" thus illustrating, too, that clearly the Christian religion has failed to solve the problem of the opposites, of good and evil, but this is another essay, one already written in many of Jung's later books.

A man dreamed for years of being pursued by dark men of various racial groups. These men were threatening and for years in dreams he avoided them, ran from them but in spite of his efforts to flee was forced in dream scenario after dream scenario to fight them, to confront them. These "dark" men carried rejected values forced into shadow by clan, clergical groups and culture, they were projected to be the "sons of darkness" as in the Mani text above. As he worked these repressed, despised, rejected and projected aspects of shadow self the dreams and the client transformed, became more human, less identified with All Good/Light. He recovered the values of the Dark, the night, the instinctual/chthonic aspects of human beingness and existence. 

In confirmation of this he dreamed of hearing a strange but familiar voice in almost complete darkness. In a space "in between" the more distant city illuminated with a blue light on the horizon and an intense immense solid blackness the voice called from the this darker than dark region. He strained his eyes to see into this darkness and ultimately saw two small lights close together punctuating the blackness. With fear and trembling he turned fully toward that darkness and traced his way slowly toward the lights which did not grow brighter as he approached but emanated instead an intense visual vibration. As he grew closer he smelled rich odors of mud, trees, water; he heard lapping sounds and knew that he was on the edge of a swamp. The voice, louder now, beckoned him to enter further. Mustering his last bit of courage, knowing his fate had led him to this encounter, he stepped into the swamp boldly, splashing loudly. As he awakened from the dream he saw that the lights were the eyes of a larger than life alligator and realized that this was no ordinary gator but the "God of Gators" -

Upon awakening he wrote:

I know only that deep night,
that way beyond sentimentality,
that way over and beyond

"the Path"but into the thicket,
the swamp, where the
god of gators waits,

submerged,

calling to me to step less
lightly upon the world.

One must recognize the all too easy temptation and avoid a toxic "Oneness", being overly identified with and thus overvaluing of one opposite over the other. Toxic Oneness is similar to that drunken solutio of wine and many ecstatic religions/religious experiences where one is emotionally "dissolved" and suddenly "one" with others, with the universe, but upon sobering up into the hard dark night or the bright harsh light of day, realizes that one is comprised ever again of both dark and light. The reconciliation of the opposites may be glimpsed in wine and "god" drunkenness but is without lasting gains nor is this state sustained. Rather, the most difficult work of ongoing confrontation with the unconscious, the personal and archetypal, the shadow in its various forms, and ongoing attempts at least to reconcile the opposites within oneself leads to greater wholeness.

This most valuable work implies assent, rendered in time, to hang, as the Hanged Man card of the Tarot depicts, upon the cross of the opposites undergoing a sacred process not created by one's self or will but by what Jung calls the Self, that central organizing transpersonal factor/dynamic beyond ego requiring something beyond gator selves and fetishized local deities of light. This suspension upon the cross is called by San Juan de la Cruz "the dark night of the soul". It is an emptying process called kenosis. It's parallel is found in all religions, major and minor throughout human history and the world. The suffering is not gratuitious and arbitrary but has a telos, a purpose though it can only be gained by enduring and by the benefit of recorded human history which traces in time the unfolding pattern of consciousness-making dependent about and resultant upon the very opposites of dark and light, instinct and reason, nature and spirit, unconsciousness and consciousness.

Although it is completely understandable, a premature dissolving into Oneness without the necessary engaging in the most difficult crushing work of confronting the opposites within oneself and enduring the suspension within and between dark and light, then for all the good intentions and utterly valid needs for soothing and hope, such a oneness is toxic which continues, and reinforces, the split within every human, human culture, and existence. Religions and spiritually-oriented communities and institutions would do well to recognize the Manichaean splitting of cosmological, theological, psychological into all Good and Light from its complementarity, all Bad and Dark, which only enlarges the split, so the inevitable war between the sons of light  and the sons of darkness persists.

**

This book was published in 1993...The Guru Papers, Masks of Authoritarian Power is encyclopedic in dissecting the various aspects of psyche involved in toxic oneness....worth owning if in recovery from pathological religion and trying to do so:

https://meaningness.com/guru-papers-monism-control