"Teeth, In This Case, Is The Beginning Of Wisdom" - Some Thoughts on Chaos, Catastrophe, and Faith, With Help From James Hillman And Michael Eigen

Sketch by Aris Moore

https://peekadoo.blogspot.com

"Teeth, In This Case, Is The Beginning Of Wisdom"

"Finished in lightning, the little chaos raves.

I meet it in all the faces that I see." - Muriel Rukeyser

"Blake's vision in his long poem is none other than the assimilation of chaos." - Christine Gallant

"Here [in chaos, in catastrophe, in shadowland] faith functions as a boundless or infinite container." - Michael Eigen

Several of James Hillman's books, Dreams and the Underworld, and Healing Fiction, especially chapter two, "The Pandaemonium of Images, Jung's Contribution to Know Thyself", deliciously explore the dimmed yet dynamic dimensions of the Nightworld, the mythic unconscious where upon entering there, says Hillman, human Dayworld values must be left behind. In the Nightworld, in Dreamtime, in the Unconscious, the world of daimons and more, one enters often kicking and screaming or, dangerously to self and others, naively (viz. there's no darkness at all). According to Carl Jung dreams are often enough ruthless "impartial facts" from the objective psyche, many people resist them knowing that if taken seriously their whole view of self, other and reality will be profoundly altered and not so readily wrestled into the ever narrowing corrals of (dis)positivity (as in dispose-tivity). Out of site in this case guarantees out-of-their-mind for even apparently "sane" and "cool" dimentias will out, the nightworld, the daimonic will out by any means necessary and cares not a hoot whether one smells of light and sandalwood or is yogically stretched yet still karmically kvetched and shadow-projected, for the psyche, the daimonic, eventually, finally-had-enough, turns like the proverbial whipped dog and bites.

Such biting increases the possibility of wholeness, real wholeness, if one does not turn away from teeth.

Teeth, in this case, is the beginning of wisdom.

In Michael Eigen's immensely wise and helpful book, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, in a section describing the function of faith in psychoanalysis and therapy work, he speaks of "the explosive or catastrophic potential in every therapeutic encounter" (page 124). This is certainly so in any encounter with the daimon. Therapeutic work implies the goal of becoming conscious and making consciousness, thus a conscious explosive/catastrophic encounter with the daimon is an inevitable arrival in good, and extremely patient, therapy.

Eigen describes William Blake's Heaven, a similar description which my daimon depicts of Hell as does Hillman in his book on the underworld, "William Blake describes heaven as all out war between every human capacity in which all have their say without compromise yet incessantly enrich and are enriched by others. Here faith functions as a boundless or infinite container (Eigen, The Psychoanalystic Mystic. Pages 124/125)."

Blake's and Eigen's appreciation of Blake's view of heaven is that of an indestructible container (as that which is required in alchemy, a vessel capable of containing the most volatile and destructive of opposites), ever expanding, allowing for each energy as equally valid/vital to participation in the creation/destruction/reformation essential to Creativity and Creation on all levels (mostly unknown given human mental limitations to ken the subtle yet profound beyond-the-senses-and-rationality process and results). Heaven is not at all about "purity" which is too often confused as one opposite on top valued over the other on the bottom and of lowest value (sin/corruption), and vice versa. The goal of alchemy from the oevre or work (volatile cooking) of alchemy is that from the intensity of energies released in the combination of such conflicting substances, and the distillation of vapors derived from the mixing of both or many, a third thing, a refined substance, a new creation born of the foundational substances which are broken down, degraded, dissolved and adulterated in order to undergo refining fires and subsesquent phases, create a new thing, a unifiying refinement which advances/evolves a new creation/evolution in (at least human) consciousness.

This all sounds "heady" but is actually the exact opposite for, though linear and with consciousness operative, the processes incorporate irrationality as one of the elements cooking with other conficting elements...the resulting alchemical product is new and vital and brings about a profound paradigm shift from the inside out.

And that, my friends, is indeed a process called "heaven."

Heaven is not a place. It is a process ever ongoing, an eternal evolution taking place in space and time yet partaking of something, and within something, a vital allusion, called eternity.

Bone Texts - Father Will, Acedia to Concordia Discors - Confessions of Doubt on a Way of Thorns — Reprise Essay [Originally published 10/23/2009]

Acedia (ah-che-dia) - spiritual or mental sloth; apathy

Concordia Discors - inharmonious harmony : harmony of discordant elements

Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors. Empedocles deliret acumen?

What does the discordant harmony of things mean, and what can it do? Is Empedocles crazy? -Horace, Epistles I.12.19

....But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence… -Nietzsche, Gay Science I.2

Bone Texts--Enter Father Will.

He has an impulse to confess more than is likely.--Randall Potts

Our path is a path of roses, but it is also a way of thorns. --Father Giovanni Melchior Bosco, now canonized, of the Salesian Society

I am walking among the emerald trees
in the night without end.-- Mark Strand


When Father Will arrived for session after yet another extended retreat to the desert hermitage in the American West he was subdued.

"My text was Mark Strand," says he.

"Stranded, huh?" I wink.

An amused groan. A shrug. "Completely in the dark this time. Not the luminous journey beneath the desert stars I had hoped for. Absence. Cold. Absolute. My bones hurt from such emptiness. If they were straws to suck on they would collapse, bend inward upon themselves too weak to crack. Fold they would. I am, as it were...folded."

We remain quiet for awhile.

His silences flay me. Viscera exposed without any drama. Well, not much. Mute. But not numb. Rather, more feelingly alive, as Rilke says, "beneath 'the more deeply untellable stars' (Ninth Duino Elegy).

Old men lose drama, I think. They simply fold. What then from the folding?

"I always expect, expect, expect...but eventually fold into circumspection. I chase my tail in circles like a miserable cur stupidly spinning in one spot without dignity before flopping into a body curl, nose to haunch, canine yoga, dumbly pleased...(bemused)...And dumb. Did I say dumb yet? After all these years?...humiliating, really...Ah, what a pity party I am today." He smiles sadly. "But I'm catching hold of that tail...beneath those cold, blinking stars above...that goddamned, even colder Bone Cabin. Jeez...(musing)...What bones I be?...they caper in dreams alone, and free... where I wish to god-a-mighty... for once, O Solitude, to...to remain dreamless... for a little while...just a little, y'know...Can't an old man...a Catholic priest, for god sakes, go for awhile...without dreams?"

More Rilke, his epitaph, comes to mind but I keep still and quote to myself silently,

O Rose. O pure contradiction.
Delight to be no one's sleep beneath
so many eyelids.

I see the old Duino poet tenderly working his beloved later roses in Muzot. He winces, brings a finger to his mouth, sucks blood drawn by a fateful thorn, a slight smile for the hazardous love of roses, this small cut a reminder of the greater gash which opened the floodgates of poetry in him. This tiny wound on a late summer day bloomed into an infection, septicemia, which killed him:

O Rose...I address the Rose...
Poets embrace irony between
The petal and the thorn, one's infectious
Absence a lover's flag of surrender,
"No one's sleep beneath so many eyelids."

Dissent no more,
Yield the insistent argument of
Dirt no longer animal.

I listen. I empty out though Father Will's words fill me richly.

When I can empty I hover between attentions, solar plexus opening. Running. Returning. Hear and feel those desert winds blowing through. I pull a shawl around my shoulders. Reach for the hot tea in the more meaningful cup, its unquestioning solidity.

This harrowing wind carves out the space between and around us. Vast sky and earth open out. One shouts over the silence portended in such immensity, to hear a howling wind a mercy then, a reference point amidst the disorientation with all directions spinning away, sounding:

"Father Will... Father Will...Father Will...forty years serving the most weary and wretched of human souls in the most desolate famine places, in war's most wasted erasures of human face after human face after human face, uncomprehending events of erasure, of becoming absent, once and no more (Rilke again) and yet to be as he, the face that remains after the unfathomable, uncountable erasures? What then, beneath 'the more deeply untellable stars'?"

In his book, Damaged Bonds, psychoanalyst Michael Eigen gives us an image for such erasures, the perpetual presencing of absence depicted in the startling, heartbreaking image of one who is electrocuted yet survives as the ongoing, unending, remnant scream, a horrible locution. Or, Father Will's approximations, a folded bone. Or remaining a living face in the face of human erasures by the unknown, untold thousands, one's very presence, Father Will's, a reminder of faces lost, absent yet present in a most terrible gape. What locution can say any of this? What poetic device? What form of therapy or religion can get near much less stand against or stay with such absenting-as-a-verb, ongoing erasure, unending evacuation?

Heart broken and breaking in it's endless capacity to do so, binding up my own folded bones loosely, o loosely, butterfly netting my own post-sparked scream, breathing into the empty space of ongoing erasure I bear witness. I must. I will. Can I?

I must.

I watch my own gathering defenses against Nothingness hammering at the barricades, my impulsive, natural stiff-arming away, or trying, the scraping defacement, the depersonalizing isolation, the waiting on the narrow ridge, the liminal plank stretched over the sucking drink [the unfathomable depth], the unknowing unutterable which begs to be said, moved, demonstrated, given form, not guarded against--build a fence around it it yet remains the Void. Funny to have that word for such a thing which is no thing at all--enter Groucho Marx, eyes rolling, cigars blazing, "You said the Void, you got the boid."

To be present one must entertain (wrong word! wrong word!) absence, erasure, caesura, fall through and into the stark clarities, the resisted fogs. Once familiar knowns, real then, are now chimerical. With haruspicate hiccups, with hallowed hysterics, with magical passes we in the human analgesia trade ease and/or appease such voiding striving to drive away that which encroaches or more horrifyingly wells up from within and around us, kith, kin, klan, kulture, even worse, konjurers. We a-void this voiding with platitudes and cures all too quickly tapping and hypnotizing, reducing-exorcising-excising history, the past, the symptom. And we call it cure, absolution, salvation, enlightenment. Or adjustment. Or even more absurdly, citizenship. 

[Waterfall. Artist - Hiroshi Shinju]

What replaces in disorientation? What displaces one's foot on the straining liminal plank when one is haplessly pushed by Fate, or stumbles, or purposely leaps, falls, drops into dizzying isolated spins to become lost in order to gain, one hopes, another--The--Orientation, True North, a foothold, a toehold even, in the Void? how does one remain present with that one who returns to you a surviving scream, a folded bone? Where is the witness, the with-ness, then? A therapist, a guide, a zen master, a guru, a pastor, a priest, a rebbe, a doctor, a psychoanalyst and other wheezing analgesics like me are loans then against the client's nothingness, the client who banks upon your/my realness/reality until the folded bone, O Ezekiel, O Koan, connects to another bone (me) and another then another all born of desertion or theft or loss or death of historical knowns, nostrums and formulas in order to grow more substantial Bone, little death by little death, to arrive at a more enlivened, embodied Bone-soul retreaded for more grab in the Void until the final summing spin.

Father Will and I hang together, beside--like the two Biblical thieves, two opposing attitudes present at once in the Hanged Man proposing surrender, both blessing and cursing--between the "Why has Thou forsaken me?" of the God-man on the Golgotha Tree and the "Gate Gate Parasamgate"--Gone Gone Gone Beyond--of remotest Siddhartha Gautama riveted to the Bodhi Tree who smiles enigmatically perhaps delighting to be no one's sleep beneath so many eyelids. The joke and yoke upon us, we two thieves, Father Will and me, have both agreed to hang together though he has in the wilderness Bone Cabin endured and broken apart in infernal, internal weather, violent storms which now shake me, fold my bones. Yet somewhere within, a kind of madness it is, there is a soft yet enduring and endearing gratefulness for this shared wound, chronicity, which opens, one hopes, through absence into infinity into Presence. Perchance to find the dream in the remnant scream which is prayer by another name--location arrived from locution.

Father Will opens a book fetched from a deep cassock pocket, worn, torn like his book, an early work by Mark Strand. He gives me the "listen up, listen close, listen well, listen deep" look to which I nod turning my better ear to hear toward him.

"This was my major text at Bone Cabin," he reports.

He pauses, sips tea, then reads some lines to me from his text, friend to friend, warmly, Autumn darkness coming on, the Harvest moon gathering clouds out the office window. There's going to be rain:


How we wish we were sunning ourselves
In a world of familiar views
And fixed conditions, confined
By what we know, and able to refuse
Entry to the unaccounted for...
We do not feel protected
By the walls, nor can we hide
Before the duplicating presence
Of their mirrors, pretending we are the ones who stare
From the other side, collected
In the glassy air.
A cold we never knew invades our bones.
We shake as though storms were going to hurl us down
Against the flat stones
Of our lives. All other nights
Seem pale compared to this, and the brilliant rise
Of morning after morning seems unthinkable.
Already now the lights
That shared our wakefulness are dimming
And the dark brushes against our eyes.


"Next week?" he asks, slowly standing up.

"Next week."


[Read the entire poem, Violent Storm, below]

****************************************************************

**"Violent Storm" from New Selected Poems by Mark Strand. Copyright © 2007 by Mark Strand. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Violent Storm**

Those who have chosen to pass the night
entertaining friends
And intimate ideas in the bright,
Commodious rooms of dreams
Will not feel the slightest tremor
Or be weakened by what seems
Only a quirk in the dry run
Of conventional weather. For them,
The long night sweeping over these trees
And houses will have been no more than one
In a series whose end
Only the nervous or morbid consider.
But for us, the wide awake, who tend
To believe the worst is always waiting
Around the next corner or hiding in the dry,
Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating
Whether or not to fell the passerby,
It has a sinister air.
How we wish we were sunning ourselves
In a world of familiar views,
And fixed conditions, confined
By what we know, and able to refuse
Entry to the unaccounted for. For now,
Deeper and darker than ever, the night unveils
Its dubious plans, and the rain
Beats down in gales
Against the roof. We sit behind
Closed windows, bolted doors,
Unsure and ill at ease
While the loose, untidy wind,
Making an almost human sound, pours
Through the open chambers of the trees.
We cannot take ourselves or what belongs
To us for granted. No longer the exclusive,
Last resorts in which we could unwind,
Lounging in easy chairs,
Recalling the various wrongs
We had been done or spared, our rooms
Seem suddenly mixed up in our affairs.
We do not feel protected
By the walls, nor can we hide
Before the duplicating presence
Of their mirrors, pretending we are the ones who stare
From the other side, collected
In the glassy air.
A cold we never knew invades our bones.
We shake as though storms were going to hurl us down
Against the flat stones
Of our lives. All other nights
Seem pale compared to this, and the brilliant rise
Of morning after morning seems unthinkable.
Already now the lights
That shared our wakefulness are dimming
And the dark brushes against our eyes.

For online reading click here or copy and paste:

http://books.google.com/books?id=I9-IBpQfghEC&pg=PT20&lpg=PT20&dq=mark+strand+%2B+reasons+for+moving&source=bl&ots=P6UUyl_bX7&sig=-pTesOGSguae7Z8iHQEIuB6eH6M&hl=en&ei=qODlSrj4GsbUlAepltnoCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=15&ved=0CD4Q6AEwDg#v=onepage&q=&f=false


Reasons For Moving

In a field
I am the absence
of field.

This is 

always the case. 

Wherever I am 

I am what is missing. 

When I walk 

I part the air 

and always 

the air moves in 

to fill the spaces 

where my body’s been. 

We all have reasons 

for moving. 

I move 

to keep things whole. --Mark Strand

“Keeping Things Whole” from Selected Poems by Mark Strand. Copyright © 1980 by Mark Strand. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

***from "The Mental Traveler" by William Blake, Complete Poems of William Blake

****The Marquet Affair: While in Berlin, Schopenhauer was named as a defendant in an action at law initiated by a woman named Caroline Marquet. She asked for damages, alleging that Schopenhauer had pushed her. Knowing that he was a man of some means and that he disliked noise, she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while standing right outside his door. Marquet alleged that the philosopher had assaulted and battered her after she refused to leave his doorway. Her companion testified that she saw Marquet prostrate outside his apartment. Because Marquet won the lawsuit, he made payments to her for the next twenty years. When she died, he wrote on a copy of her death certificate, Obit anus, abit onus ("The old woman dies, the burden is lifted.-http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#The_Marquet_Affair


"Point of No Return", Collision Center, Randall Potts, O Books (January 1994)

The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Spender & J.B. Leishman, Norton Press.

Dreams and the Underworld, James Hillman, Harper & Row,

Damaged Bonds, Michael Eigen, Karnac Press

Winter Field.  Keene, NY

<><><>

ALL  PHOTOS BY WARREN FALCON.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO HIM.  SHOULD YOU WISH TO USE A PHOTO THEN CONTACT WARREN ON THIS BLOGSPOT SITE.

*****

PART TWO OF FATHER WILL'S "CONFESSIONS" - CLICK HERE:

https://falconwarren.blogspot.com/2009/10/father-will-folded-bone.html

dark water charcoaled with orange sky - a brief moment of my life

Rereading the autobiography of Wright Morris whom I've never read before, his novels, rather, 'cept for this his autobiography, A Cloak of Light, when I was in my 30's feeling trapped by New York City. No, wait, not by the city but by myself on yet another shelf even in the most adventurous city in the world, or one of them. And I so wanted adventure thus New York and my Harlem basement room where I "ensconced" reading reading reading as I did everywhere I'd lived, rather, read, on night shifts, and in between shifts, more given by introversion to inner adventures though preachers warned me that these were the worst kind. But the outer ones, the stuff which made/compelled/miseried as my shadow, "will out" but I. not yet ready for the outing, found them in the books I read, and in the twice weekly sessions with Betsy, the patient Jungian analyst, who got plenty of shadow from my dreams. More than once she'd nod out while I was talking on and on which hurt my feelings but I now realize that my shadow was so very big and as yet to be touched that I put her to sleep, made her unconscious, so as to avoid a confrontation with the shadow. I'd silently steal away, ashamed, a personal check on her side table, and walk from East 92nd and 1st Avenue to West Harlem.

Much as I desired a life "in the world" I clearly wasn't ready so in sessions as with books I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to escape a destined, Jung would warn, "doomed" encounter a few years ahead. . .but I was determined to read only about it, dream about it, take notes, keep journals, yet on some occasions late night by the Hudson River near the corner of West 142nd Street I would relent, cave, rave, shout, weep, threaten the water, life itself on both banks, even and especially that Goddamned indifferent sentinel Maxwell House Cup forever tilted with it's petrified drop never dropping, I pledged revenge, retribution, a long list of bullies spilling out of my mouth where they'd at last flounder then flush beneath the dark water charcoaled with orange sky. Only to come to life and dryer land in me again come the morning. Fuck the pigeons. Then. Me and pigeons are good now.

Reading Wright Morris, his travels and dare-thee-wells was greatly satisfying back then. Still is. Now in my late 60's, well into shadowland and vigor mortis I am companion to others who turn pages or count days until the life sentence comes in again, morning after morning, the second act of the play of life trying to play it out, resolve the clot or plot. Or not.

I am nostalgic for another child in me who has yet to be lived, fleshed out, but now said flesh such as it is/I am is on the sag and hairing up gray to white, so what's to be done about it, this urge for lively living, for Blake's lost child?

Last night's dream reveals a golden pickle, yes, golden, and pickle (life's a pickle), unearthed in an ancient Egyptien ruin, that of a king named Horus. I was/am awed by the find but stumped as back then in ancient times, and now still this was/is the Key of Keys. An adventure for sure. But where's Betsy now that I need her, her dead for at last 20 years? Will make do and of it on my own. A close friend nickname in the '80's "McDoo" for "make do". I'm of a practical bent. A later analyst calls it "compensated oral." I'll not quarrel though I could. Perhaps should. The recommended healing collapse on the psychoanalytic menu offerings did not come with three sides nor a bread basket and I, basket, was already "case" enough. Humor in tact though.

The shadow boy's here in this Lorca bit truer and blue balled for LIFE as ever as I turn Morris pages, me yet again living vicariously:

"I am going to ask Christ to give

me back my childhood, ripe with sunburn and feathers and a wooden sword."

This passage, Morris's close encounter with what Jung calls the Anima, a vision real, but the road and Europe prevails so. . . . .

Mumps eyes plead 'no mountain' - from Covid Journals, Crow Flight Over Meadow

Spruce Hill Farm. Keene, NY.  Easter 2013. 

S'been a'swelter up here in higher mounts upstate NY. 90's. Humid. Like walking around with a large hot sponge over your entire head. Cue Darth Vader breathing soundtrack. But, ah, Keene in winter...glorious. Quiet. Still. Until the howl begins, the blow, the fury snow and cloud chaos obliterate all orientation but for sound. Then eventually return to stillness morning blue hues of sun and ice repainting the known world. The old barn stands a little taller proud of its long black shadow over the mascaraed field whom I affectionately call Mabel for memory of the late '70's Waffle House waitress who worked what I called the 'midnight waffles' shift from midnight to 8 am. Heavy on the make up, eyelids turquoised, eyebrows plucked out then painted in with blackest mascara, and all the rest, powder pink blush, cheek and forehead powdered sugar white, a high stack of blue hair, a Pall Mall cig stub stuck to her bottom purple lipsticked lip. Return to frozen field and qualities of color in sheer sunbright snow white clarity primaries with edged shadow subtleties. Unlike cities. Mabel and me. Now she's pretty with purple and shades of green, wild flowers sprinkled, butterflies so many that I tolerate the biting black flies to gestalt the field and flight/alight vision expanded to pixilations framed only by the extent of my unpainted eyelids. Hedge hog moves through the now tall grass. I track its movement across the wide field to the old once was a well, concrete crumbling, a good place to dig in for the season safer from the raven, the coyote and fox. Heard a yip after dusk last night. Might be the wary coyote hovering always just below the near steep lledge or at yard meets woods edge, Mumps I call him some sag or other at his left maw, a limp on forward left paw leg twisted suspect a car hit him survives now forever on edges nothing bold like a regular road crossing or crow flight over meadow or even straight up Marcie's ice scars' mountain dares still trying to pass but imperceptible cuz aeons - Mumps eyes plead 'no mountain' when we make rare eye contact I try to send some friendly thoughts trying what friend Valdosta does a wounded animal herself so, being wounded, is a healer she softly chants

come come come come
come come come come

showing both hands flat palms up for frightened animal to see

come come come come

I've seen her charm racoon-chewed dogs mauled-cats sick-horse motherless-runted-out-kittens into won-trust and life-enough

Mumps ain't having any come come come come

slow eats what's left whats offered in the meadow past dark and Mabel where ravens get to work moon or not peck for the better portions they like bones just like the furred do - Mumps near's watching content enough to eat what might be left of leftovers or excavated fare from back of fridge long forgotten all mold blue or green some slimed things even the barn cats turn their discerning noses to

Already mourning having to return to the City in mid-August.

But my Kobayashi Issa book gathers dust on the side table where I foolishly left it forgotten in my haste to escape the city return to Keene. One thing to look forward to though - Issa. And gathered things such are markers of a life, bookstacks of course, sculptures, paintings, totems, random rocks, crystals, rusted once functioning parts of machinery now in decline/dis/un-use objets d'art photos de de de epochs (brief though ever lingering) friends places meals buses' trains' windows passings through, milky filmy insides again dimmed though solid though artifact - a spider web a century(?) constancy inside containment's bottle excavated beneath 100 year old house 1980 or so who knows where the time tracking goes - dwelt in (alluded century) foot of Mount Mitchell Blue Ridge highest, more bottles 18th century an old tin of snuff snuff still in't and th' dipper one old spoon a bent fork a child's trinket gum machine ring (who wore that?), a silver metal comb needing dental work after ages hairs silvered time transluscent intwined....friends tell me it's time to sort, let go, release these things. I respond with these lines from poet and zen teacher John Tarrant:

There is a blessed fidelity in things.
Useless things grow lovely with good uses.

And these lines (to end it here) by maestro Nathaniel Mackey to sing once more for [I am] useless things -

ghost[s] of an alternative
life... They were we before
we were, ancestral, we who'd
never not be ill at ease.
A vocation for lack he'd have
said, she'd have said longing,
a world, were they to speak, be-
tween...

What wasn't, they'd
have said, went away,
would come back,
first fanatic church,
what would be...

All photos by Warren Falcon (all rights reserved to him)

Respondeo Ergo Sum - Upon Freeing The Gift Of Creativity Turned Inward

Dream image

"...I formulate the first principle as Respondeo, ergo sum...I am in so far as I respond. I arise on all levels of my being (body, sense organs, soul and mind) only by responding. Man comes into being by an act of response; his evolution consists of interrelated and complicated acts of response. As long as he is alive he responds..." —H. R. Heinemann, from Existentialism and the Human Predicament

for Elaine, Anima-as-Fate

"There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most...The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up." - May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

This afternoon while still somewhat hungover from last night's rich meal and more than several glasses of red wine, I stumbled as one does when hungover, only today without feet but with eyes, upon the above quote by May Sarton. I had awakened this morning with fragments of a dream, repetitive of other dreams the past few months, where I am carrying something precious and just cannot put it down in any old place or upon just any available surface. I cannot put it down until I find the right surface and location.

These dreams are full of torrential flood waters, or backed up, stagnant water, toilets full of filth and pungent bright orange dark urine days old and fermenting. I cannot unhand the burden even though the urge to pee or flee or drive a car away or into flood waters is strong. I must not put down the burden odd as it is; it is my laptop carrying case (in my dream) made of canvas (as in canvas for painting). It is large enough to carry not only my laptop but also many books with which I cannot, will not, be parted from as they are the must-have-with-me-always 'bread', my staple and stability in a given-to-me world-out-of-balance.

I have understood the dreams only a little - something within the psyche is flooding up, over-spilling or has already, has not been adequately canalized, channeled, streamed and guided, shaped and formed. Or flushed. I knew that eventually, as dreams do when one sits consciously, patiently, persistently with them (since they persist, archetypal psychologist James Hillman calls them "psychological insistencies"), they would yield their messages to me and, upon revelation, these must be obeyed, brought out, externalized, into the world, Carl Jung having said that one has a moral responsibility to dreams once they are kenned they must be conscientiously acted upon in the outer world. Just dreaming is not enough. Everyone dreams but not very many know to dream them out into the world, to let their messages unfurl, flood and flow to bring forth new consciousness, to reshape old forms no longer adequate to self, place/environment and time, bringing their symbol and their sense, usually not literal, into lived reality.

And thus, only just now, upon opening up haphazardly in a book about Dostoevsky and his struggle with addictions which mirror the profound compulsion to create at any cost perhaps beyond one's capacities to renew oneself, I find May Sarton's quote and suddenly the dreams clarify and sharpen into focus; I understand them as the burden of creativity too long turned inward, the burden of writing, the burden of poetry which I have carried heavily for most of my life since middle school when I was 11 or 12 years old when books became my lifeline, my links to existence so that I could live on in spite of not wanting to do so. Written words, books, kept me from disappearing though I was and remain a mostly invisible though enfleshed (reluctantly) word.

Thus the floods. One cannot ignore them. Alphabets tumble and roil. One dare not ignore them. One must see them without choice to not see them. In them I am suddenly made visible, bright orange piss pot and all. I am both appalled and pleased. My burden is here upon my knees.

The backed up water, the urine, is creativity. A somewhat odd symbol of creativity, there is more than enough evidence that urination is symbolic of self expression which is creativity. In ancient Rome the highly valued dirt from the urinals of boys' schools was collected to be used as a cosmetic in order to restore youthful energy and looks. A young boy, or puer in Latin, is an archetypal symbol of ongoing creativity and inspiration, the puer aeternas, the eternal youth, well springs of ongoing creativity still imaged in solid fountains of the world where eternal waters flow from the peni of cherubic youth.

I have struggled my entire life with a strong urge to create, to write, to express in words that creative daemon within which torments no matter the completion of a poem or essay, a lecture, a psalm. And now my dreams have had me consciously, urgently seeking a place to put the burden down, to perhaps come to it anew. I imagine that landing the burden means bringing it down to earth, manifesting creativity all the more by bringing my efforts to others, for the strongest part of the compulsive urge in my creativity has been to contribute one good thing, one good poem or piece of writing, which in some way might further the culture even if only by a flea's leg length.

The dreams urge me to let the urine flow, to let the flood waters indeed flood over, to be less self conscious of what I write and to have at it all, to say my say. And to let whatever waves there are crest and break upon ever receptive banks and shores whose duty it is to allow what may come from motion without complaint, more compliant toward as yet to be fully formed purposes as yet to be scored.

Synchronistically, a few days ago I listened to a lecture by poet Allen Ginsberg about Walt Whitman and his imitators, those who were goodly influenced by his effulgent, self indulgent style, his garrulous poetry which presumed to express the very expansiveness of the North American continent over-flooded by a plague of itinerant, persistent poachers-and-prophets from Europe to Eastern disembarkation then inland and Westward turned, manicly (maniacally) compelled to overtake/sweep up land and native peoples in their possessed, pushed wake.

Ginsberg imagined himself to be a timely extension of this unruly school, as savage as the projected upon land and justly-resistant, resident humanity stretched beyond known bounds and sounds. Blood drowned and pounded, the god-(greed)-hounded, Christhaunted land even now floods by unleashed mighty rivers seeking, if rivers seek at all, to undo and renew in horse shoe and other shapes the crimes of unconsciousness compelled to overtake while leaving it up to human souls to repent and repair, to prepare for more powerful insurgencies of land and Self ever seeking new and nower expressions of dirt and deity both scared and sacred. There's enough history beneath layers to support the scarp and scrape of momentary yet monumental motions finally given mouths to utter what lies both beneath and within the heaping huzzahs of here-here here full and deep. As in my dream, it is hard to steer in such surpassing tides and currents. Still, I am searching for holy campground that I may lay my own burden down.

I have no wish to imitate Whitman nor Ginsberg though both are easily imitated since they did so themselves, an occupational hazard for writers (no anxiety bout that here, but assent only, to the inevitable evolution word by word by those who write them), mine is only to be obedient to the daemon, that urgent, emergent, creative force within. It rushes within and against me. No matter whether derived of the grandiose American continent and the even more grandiose sky or not, I have all too successfully braced against it in fear of failure, reprisal or, worse, complete indifference by/from others. My dreams now urge floods and resultant coagulations, they bring creative splurges to ground from mind/lung-hand to the hard still unplumbed world. And Nature, too, is indifferent but begs none the less and all the more to be given utterance and response.

Respondeo ergo sum. I respond, therefore I am. I respond, therefore the other, THAT other, earth, and all her ants, IS, as long as there are eyes, ears, (mouths/teeth) and scanning minds to acknowledge and touch, wrestle, bite, caress, shape/misshape - some in stuttering or sibilnnt scansions - outer from inner, inner from outer, landscapes to be all too quickly discarded in time for what is sung just ahead. And seen. Or hoped, all praise to telescopes. We would be they, so addicted to horizons (so adhered to/identified with distances), to bring them close.

Something there is needs completion-via-coagulation, forming, shaping, and sharing with whomever may be open to clods delivered. If not, rivers will, as they will without reason, continue to overrun their banks and insist upon covering designated previous cultivations. Let then excess of creativity have its say, play out, and leave the critical post-considerations to others. I will surely sit and ponder spent what spills forth, to shape, to edit, to discard. And watch my little yard sink beneath needed and needy floods.

I will have-done with deprivation and bring myself, what I have shaped and misshapen, to the world. These things, this burden, have I most loved and felt responsible for, have born the shame of. I have fought and have failed utterly again and again though my attempts have been, and still are, sincere though not blameless. Fear has been my encampment, a longing beneath knowing feet in secret cellars just beyond reach of contracted hands forever spelling hunger. I know open bastion doors and windows to now fling beyond embankments what has been wrung out of my floes and woes though hands wither from too too much turning-against-and-inward. What a relief to burst beyond boundaries too long successfully restraining**(see footnote below).

I recently wrote a poem about much too too solid bastions of self, of forceful puer energy ramming through and over-and-into long buried storms and petrified forms, of passion mangling the delusion of 'norms' ignoring too too sensitive alarms. Given May Sarton's May revelation this morning I now understand that the poem is about more than eros, it is about that powerful creative/destructive force (by any and every means necessary), the daemon/tyro that ever urges outward intent on making and staking Self in new land overtaken and, at least one aging man, wrenched and rendered from dried and calcified encrustations. 

I am, to borrow from the insistent dream image, beginning to leak. And to break open.

Large stone outdoor sculpture near the Tate Modern

in London

Archeology - What The Stele Says 'Upon Taking A Much Younger Lover

I am uncovered, thin, bared upon thinner 
sheets the man-ripped to many images, 
torn into, landscaped to former curves. 
No longer do I grieve enclosure, touching 
only myself, delivered from layers. 

What begins to be, earth swell, breaks 
root-room open to blood means. 

All hurt now stings twilight quaked into being. 
Your breath falls upon me now, taut, sinew, 
bruising hands, purple insides flare warrior nerves 
to unknotting surprise. 

Magpie dances. 

Lines, veins, strung between Pole Star 
and First River Mouth, an embedded ruin uncovers in milk floods. 
Touch gently first what has been too long concealed. 

Hard touch congeals once was telling mud remolded into 
"Not again. Not yet the bleeding Centurion." 
Wield roughly then through gates too long shut. 

When I cry out, do not mind. Blindly ram. Do not stop. 

Magpie, my keeper, is flying.

**Psychology would call this represssion but THAT is another essay/article altogether.