Masks

Name: Masks
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME VIII: MASKS

CONTENTS

Notes on the Act: Poem-Making
Aesthetic Unreality
The Poetic Violence Done of Tiresias
The Higher Identity
The Metaphysic of Existence
Emotion and Feeling in Poetry
Thinking-Through-Being
The Ha(l)ving to Speech
Salvations
Odysseus
On the Artificiality of Modern Culture
O, Storms of Feeling
Today I spin my wings…
Mankind: The Theatre of the World
Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo
The Function of Pleasure in Technological Modernity
The Essential Poetics of Divinatory Methods
The Collective Consciousness of Man
The Loss of the Natural World
The Way Forward
An Orchestra
The World Psyche Overturned
Wherein Resides The Power of The Infinite
The Nature of Poesis
The Divine Feminine as the Spider of Fate
The Industrialization of the World and the Loss of Meaning in the Gods of Nature
Jacob’s Ladder and the Resonance of Consciousness
The Ecstatic Wager
The Agon of the Spirit
Notes on Nietzsche, Wagner, Camus, and Vivekananda
On Nobility
The Turning of the Modern Dial
The Cosmology of Vladimir Mayakovsky
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The mythic concept of the task of the poet ought to be defined through the profane concept of the instrument. The great poet never confronts his work simply as the producer; he is also, at the same time, its consumer. Naturally, in contrast to the public, he consumes it not as entertainment, but as tool. This instrumental character represents a use value that does not readily enter into the exchange value.

                       - Walter Benjamin




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I will lie against these bedrooms, exquisite futilities - Beneath their dark sheets of poem And sleep and dream of muted stars, Even now hurtling away Blinking with the wide eyes of a newborn bull These hill yards spitting into the hoop of the sky Where I, too, came down to chew the cud of the flesh and Stare into the face of nothing - Congratulatory, proud, Jeering its bespectacled nose.

Here I stand - Twenty-six, Barely skin and yet my spirit lilts toward unknown Convictions, The secret reason of these poems. Tonight is like an outhouse in the darkness - A name I knew before. Tonight, I’ll linger on the doorstep of existence like a housecat To look upon these ecstasies once more Before I pass into new rhythms: With a bottle and some loose poems In this hallway Of slivered moonlight.

NOTES ON THE ACT: POEM-MAKING

… then all these vague movements of bones and lips will be no more than a mask to tear off, a mask that conceals nothing but an inner conflagration. Beneath the ashes and the burnt remains he discerns a movement which is difficult to detect, yet all the more likely to make him catch his breath – all of life in slow formation, little by little revealing to his eye its incandescent traces and endlessly fractured structure…

Bataille

The poet must clear his schedule, his convictions, so that the poem might come through and enlighten him to his condition. Poetry, in this sense, is the self identifying itself, or the self becoming truer to being than that the poet could possibly imagine by the extended faculties of his intellect as being-attached to him. The poem is, here, an autonomous being as being-of-spirit, capable of moving anywhere and through any-thing; in this sense functions primarily as an enlightening-becoming-thing - imbuing the thing with its essential ‘thingness’ - which is always already the poem. The poet lies prostrate before the poem; the prayer is always the vehicle of the poem, the chant, the invocation of being by many names. It is in this sense that the poem is first and foremost religious, but wildly so - in the wild religion of man in relation to the forces which govern his flesh and spin it from wind and stone; wildly in the dance that man performs to enshroud himself in the mists of the soul. For the poem comes about as a word, a whisper, a whisper which is not man’s and thus un-possessable; the un-possession of the poem is that which imbues and leaves man of its own accord as that which is accorded and dictum of spiritude, proper. It does not obey physical laws; the gravity and gravitas of the poem is pure light.

Here, language and the word are salutary and medicinal - as being-unto-language is gifted with the word of light which pierces the body, creating the immanent state of living as

revealed unto and through the being as beingness. The word of spirit is a curative to the poet, the one who comes to the poem prostrate, the one who comes to the poem aware of his essential spiritude as a casket, a vessel, a cast, an urn, a clay pot. The poem, then, strips the poet of his conceptual ‘beingness’ as being that which he thought he was before, into a new door, phase, or threshold of being-consciousness- of-itself. By way of these skittish definitions, we come into a different conception (as in being-born) of art entirely - a conception which is a perpetual self-creation of the being- emanant by way of poetry as the vehicle which transmutes spiritude, light, and ecstasy, to and from the cask of the mortal world, or the emanant ‘things’. The poem, itself, is that which is exactly the process of life-making and life- taking as the apparent observation of human beings as the coming and going of spiritude from the life-vessel which is the ‘thing’, the ‘body’, the ‘flesh’ - in and out of light- bearing as that which communicates spirit through the mouth, the hands, the eyes, the doorways of express consciousness.

The poem, then, is the a-priori ‘thingness’ and becoming process of all existence, in that the poem is the condition of being-conscious-of-itself as that which tells, unwittingly, the secret of itself to itself in its own language which is the expression as the unconcealing of spiritude by way of the created and creating ‘thing’ which is always already (of) itself. The gesticulation of the poet is only by the one who is giving birth to himself by way of a speech which tells a true story, or a story made true in the telling of it - a story which is revealed and unveiled by way of the speech act as that which escapes into the thing of exhalation. The poet, then, does not exist but that vessel which is close to emptiness, naught except emanence but as a receptive towards spiritude, looking and gazing toward spiritude as to be willing to be changed, yet again, into some other being entirely. The paradox of the poet is as thus - he does not exist long enough as any one given thing so as to exist as anything other than a compendium of being as beings, faces, masks - all of which must be willing to give themselves

up absolutely to the will of the poem; the will of the spiritude. The poet is a master of masks - one who can inhabit them so fully to the point of bursting, and yet can shed them as he is called to shed them by the breath of the spirit which comes and goes through him. The mask here is the emotion; the emotion embodied as a characterization which is being-as-the-word, or the body becoming emote, the thing that moves archetypally - or as an essential character. The poet is always already Oedipus, Iago, and both Vladimir and Estragon, Desdemona, Don Giovanni, as well as the one who writes them. This is the crucial truth of poetry - in that the character of the being is always writ from beyond the characterization; in this sense the character of the being must be broken to reveal that which makes the emanent light from beyond-flesh. This is the comedy and tragedy of the fall of man which is always also a ‘rising’; in that the man is dashed upon the rocks a thingness is revealed from the juxtaposition of the ruined thing gone from itself, the body abandoned and left with nothing. The attraction of the downfall of famous men, scandalized, is this phenomenal manifestation among human beings - the manifestation of the great thing diminished in its perceptible thingness to the one that observes the reduction of the ‘human’ scaled to and from its fundamental baseness. It is this baseness that is forgotten and consigned to the exiles and undergrounds - the baseness that is the beingness of all things - the spiritude that remains.

For Milton wrote of this quintessence of man which is in his writings like a ‘violl of fift-essence’; it is in this way that modern man still communes and reckons with Dante and Virgil - the spiritude which remains untarnished and howling in the book; in the made things which survive time, the made things that are buried like Ritsos’ poem capsules or lost cities, the made things that are burned in the air and made ash; the made things which sink into the water and lie

telling new stories differently on the ocean floor. The entirety of the material world is perpetually scandalized by the existence of the spirit even as it changes forms and takes on new disguises which are also remarking upon that which
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was once novel and remarkable to the human ear and eye. In this way the spirit is the poem over time, taking on the guise of the pauper, the king, the scientist, the magician, the deal-maker, the criminal, the cat. The poem becomes even as that which is in existence resists its revelation; the revelation which is always already simultaneously a becoming and an un-becoming, a spirit rendered and rent from the materiality in changed forms in order to become altered and change expressions. This is the essential dialogue of being with itself; the dialogue of being which is most accurately represented as a poet in an empty room that is also an expansive terrain, composing poems which remark upon themselves as that which have already been creation, even forgotten creation that lie now still, in shadow, watching from the ground, the sea, the sky. For if the secret poems of time lie hidden in these other places, the act and work of poetry is the essential fire which alights as and from the ecstatic spirit - the coal that burns in the body; the perennial digestive which eats itself up and yet in this consumption, creates itself from itself by way of burning away that which is to evisce that which it might become unto absolute becoming; burned away to the absolute stone of being. This is the crazed futurity which is beyond human conception - a futurity so absolute and immense and stolid that it is exactly inhuman - with the precision and coldness of a statu(t)e.

The poem, however, is that which escapes finality in becoming by way of the human hand which touches and is touched by spirit and in this communion becomes imperfectly; this imperfection of the poem is precisely what allows it to pass refracted through becoming as a chamber of dreaming; a hallway which perpetually remembers the human experience by way of the poetic authority which is the inspiration of being-within-poetry. This state of being ensconced - as being as a poet wholly stripped of all lawful conceptions of being - is that which, to the poet who is always a rebel and exile of language unto speech, the opportunity to create and truly create as that process which is a violent birth - a birth which is at once ecstatic and revels

in the knowing madness of ecstasy. The ecstatic is the only place for the poet; it is the dwelling place of all poetry; the greatest efforts of man are enshrined there in ecstatic communion with being. There, and from that place, the poem identifies the poet; comes down through him in order to enlighten him to his true condition - if he is willing to listen to the poem, and not attempt to escape its terrible truths. The truths of the poem are the only possible truth tellings, in that they tell the story of man to man; the story of man that he cannot tell as he is being-within that story, the story of the whole of being as a raging fire composed of brief candles of soulful configurations. The poet is horrified, raging too, and yet cannot escape the ultimate reality of its existence into absistence - the perpetually looming absentia of the being-human into being returned to spiritudes. The poet goes down there consciously and sifts the depths of this essential paradox for the poems which emerge, like him too, like emanations from the field of dark consciousness yet made into light-objects.

Here, in this place of poetry, the terrible truths of the poem that tell themselves to man are terrible in the sense that they are sublime, primordial; that they persist and reveal themselves unto existence at and in the absolute depths of the man as himself perpetually on the verge of absistence; the negation of the body and the recoiling of himself back up into spiritude like a vortex within his stomach that pulls him into re-encounter with his abyssal self, his essential nature as a point between two absolute points - a light project outward in a cone and a light eject inward in a cone; that staging of being between two points as the emanation of man as a ‘thing’ lugging his thingness about his flesh as his burden as being on the edge of himself unto birth and death as the incarnation and disincarnation of spiritude taking his form for a moment of exstatic burning. Man becomes visible to himself in the dark light of this place, having gone so far inward and downward that he has bumped into his shadow; a shadow which has revealed him to himself as a limited conception.

AESTHETIC UNREALITY

The age for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss.

Heidegger

To cultivate aesthetic detachment is to simultaneously acknowledge the ‘materiality’ that is this composition of the ‘world-thing’ and the ‘self-thing’ as apparent, or phenomenological – and to acknowledge the absolute unreality of aesthetic existence as the mask of Being – the apparent ‘thing’ which asserts the ‘thingness’ of Being virtually into and through ‘the being’, proper. This aesthetic detachment is the acknowledgement of the mask of existence as absolutely aesthetic and yet in this creativeness of being made apparent in the creation of ‘the being’, ‘the being’ retains a stone or absolute essence of that ‘beingness’ to and from which it is brought into and out of its ‘being’ by that which it is – the Being both phenomenological and pneumenological – the Being of both two faces.

This aesthetic detachment can only come about in the perpetual readmittance of the essential paradox of Being into the forefront of vision. The being, in this sense, perceives itself as not being itself; in this not-being-itself, is absolutely enconsced in Being proper, and yet dislocated from the self identity which would bring it into everclear relation with Being, the intersection of itself and Itself. The aesthetic detachment is the absolute unreality of the aesthetic mask which is the face, the body, the world, the self of ‘the being’ unto the absolute point which, like a vortex in the center of its chest, pulls the being back and into itself – perpetually a black hole which absolves materiality of itself by way of an absolute subjection to time, which returns the being (in)to itself, Being proper.

The aesthetic detachment is precisely that which allows the creation of an aesthetic existence, or total individuality which is the being in relation to Being by way of identifying

with that which is essential to it, its ‘beingness’ – an identification which absolves it through the artificial self- world dichotomy of thing-in-representation to itself. This is the shattering of the mirror of dialectical representation as being-in-the-world, which is also the being-within-history and the being-within-human and the being-within- language. This shattering of the mirror is also the death of the self in the world as an artificial, or philosophical death which is the breaking of the ground of the being in relation to itself, or the soul-relation – a relation which evisces the self-other dynamic as it is traditionally represented to, through, and into a catacomb, or death-shadow of itself; into a new space of awareness which is the self-other as self- Self.

This mode of absolute relationship is the negation of an externality by way of the abjection of the being through itself as a sort of inversion of the being as being-of-itself absolutely; a realization of aesthetic attachment to the world concept and the self concept to mutually validate the ‘other’ – both of which are images creatively asserted and spoken from the mouth-mask of Being, proper. The only way in which these concepts ‘exist’ as in dialectical opposition to eachother is if they have not yet been resolved as being from the source of itself – Being, proper. It is in this way that the creative and imagined ‘things’ confront one another with their ‘thingness’ in the world of their own representation – the creation of a world populated with selves as ‘individuated’ from one another by way of the absolution which is the creation of the self-image in relation to the creation of the world-image – a simultaneous separation which is also the aesthetic separation of the sign from the signified – the representation of the thing from that which the thing ‘is’ supposed to be. In the shattering of a dialectical model of consciousness is the folding of the paper which is the collapse of the artificial distinctions of differentiation to and into that procedure of Being eviscing itself through the being which forms and formulates them as manifestations, figures, and branch-procedures.

The root ‘problem’ of Being becoming through ‘the being’ is the confusion created in and through the establishment of a primarily (if not wholly) aesthetic existence through which ‘things’ and their images come into being and populate the stage of the world as props, masks, and figures to be taken literally, totally, and seriously. What I mean here is that the aesthetic materiality as the manifestation of that which is seen, observed ‘phenomenological’ is taken literally as that which is, as that which is absolutely Being; furthermore, that this phenomenological reality is all that is possibly valuable as product of this perpetually partially obscured process which is the coming and going of the being to and from Being, proper – a process and procedure which is always already a deception – as that which emerges out into the world of ‘the being’ (the sphere of the phenomenological) has never left Being, proper – where the thing exists phenomenologically and pneumenologically – at once half and whole, at once together and apart. This paradoxical Reality which is at once materiality and pneumenality is the composition of the world as the shadow of the self; the self as the shadow of the world. Each haunts the other perpetually; each composes the antiscionic mask of the other as that which is known and unknown, seen and unseen, understood and misunderstood, spiritualized and materialized, alike.

If the world and the self are created in the half-light of the material, they are of course also steeped in the ‘other’-half- light of the pneumenological – that which throws and takes the being to and from the thresholds of the material: the pseudo-dialectical movement through this hallway of Being which is also the River Styx called Charon. This ferrying of the thing of being, only ‘living’ by way of the pneumena- spirit which breathes through it, is the condition of man and the world of man – a world which, according to the dictates of his Enlightenment philosophy of that which is (including that-which-is-human) is constructed in and from a place of absolute empirical difference from and walled apart from the pneumenological as that which is without-logic. Of course, this pneumenological aspect of Being as absistence is

without ‘logic’ as being-without-body, being-without-flesh, being-without-form. This realm is the realm of the pure soul transacted into ‘the being’ as existent by way of the perpetual process of re-ensoulment – a process which, of course, founds and yet confounds the material processes of man – processes which constitute his existence. As he is confounded by them he is of them; as he is of them, he is unaware of the full resolve and movement of them (perhaps ‘Chaos’) to and through that which is his perpetual birth into, through, and unto himself (as being unto Being); thus, he wears the mask of himself, the first fool, confounded by both his self-image and the world-image which, as a youth, he finds himself impressed upon and yet inextricably apart from. The youth attempts to resolve the two, and yet, he finds himself further and further away from himself and that other himself which is the shadow drawn unto him and the earth by way of the sun which he is of; yet he is not.

This being human is, of course, a systems-process of Being moving to and through itself, a fundamentally poesis-process which is poetics; the induction of consciousness to and through aesthetic existence into and through dys-thetic absistence, or a disjection or removal from the thetic- possibility, which is also the possibility of creating an arrangement. The coming and going of man is a coming and going from derangement into a brief arrangement with the phenomenological mask of material terms (that which might be called the physic) – coming into and out of the breath which is a derangement of the senses; a shuttering generation and degeneration of the phenomenological body formation. At each pneumenological opening, the phenomenological body is deranged from itself; this is to say at and in each respiration the being is upon the cross of the pneumenological and phenomenological – which is to say that in each breath there is revelation.

The Janus gates then, acquire a double and added significance in that they represent, much like Charon, the perpetual straddling of Being unto itself (the being- phenomenological, as observable and observing and

observed) – as the doors of and through a passage which might be called ‘time’, but that which is – more precisely – the breathing without time, or the fire of Being. The Janus gates are the converted a-stance of breath which then becomes the word-form of the being, or the pseudo- ‘primary’ figure observed by that which it is; that which is created of the breath of Being into itself. It is in this way that all observable phenomena are masks of Being; conductors of the play of Being which is the dance of figurated flames unto falling, exhausted, absisted of breath. The dervish, in this sense, is the dancer and player of Being most absolutely revealed to itself; performing itself absolutely and dancing intimate if not ecstatically reabsorbed absolutely; gone from the being-thing. Here, too, is the poet by way of the breathing of words in which the poet is gone from poetry the poet is gone. The b/Being enconsced is then the utmost manifestation of the ‘human-existence’; furthermore, of all existence in that it unifies itself within and as the polarity of existence and absistence at the middle point between the two as embodying while exbodying beingness as act.

The dervish and the ecstatic poet are both doubly fools, in that they have experienced themselves and experience themselves and thus do not exist but as a mask, or as an apparance, or ghost of that which is. Just as the worldly man looks in the mirror and observes a ghost or an impossible shadow behind him, the ecstatic poet observes the worldly man and worldly ‘things’ as half truths; within himself, he seeks to commune with the stone of the thingness which serves as the threshold; the absolute point, the dancing stone between the two worlds. The poet’s flesh pulls at emanation; his soul pushes at spirit; the becoming-tension of the drawing up and down and left and right of the poet’s being explodes and implodes his existence and absistence. Aesthetic detachment is this height of being – a detachment born from the contradictory impossibility of being any longer; the tension which pushes and pulls the poet perpetually into and out of existence as the breath. It is at this furthest point that both the phenomenological and the pneumenological are abandoned; at the threshold of Janus’

gates which are also the Gates of Hell, the centre cannot hold… and yet, there is night and day, emanation and ecstasy, spirit and flesh.

‘Long is the destitute time of the world's night. To begin with, this requires a long time to reach to its middle. At this night's midnight, the destitution of the time is greatest. Then the destitute time is no longer able even to experience its own destitution. That inability, by which even the destitution of the destitute state is obscured, is the time's absolutely destitute character. The destitution is wholly obscured, in that it now appears as nothing more than the need that wants to be met. Yet we must think of the world's night as a destiny that takes place this side of pessimism and optimism. Perhaps the world's night is now approaching its midnight. Perhaps the world's time is now becoming the completely destitute time. But also perhaps not, not yet, not even yet, despite the immeasurable need, despite all suffering, despite nameless sorrow, despite the growing and spreading peacelessness, despite the mounting confusion. Long is the time because even terror, taken by itself as a ground for turning, is powerless as long as there is no turn with mortal men. But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own nature. That nature lies in this, that mortals reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers. Mortals, when we think of their nature, remain closer to that absence because they are touched by presence, the ancient name of Being. But because presence conceals itself at the same time, it is itself already absence. Thus the abyss holds and remarks everything.’

Heidegger
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THE POETIC VIOLENCE DONE OF TIRESIAS

The poet bangs his head against the wall and finds being- meaning itself. The contact of the poet’s embodied spirit against the phenomenal limits produces a frictive spark which is also the grinding away of the stone of the being to produce particulars more closely resembling that-which-it- is. In this way, we again must gesture to the poet as being closer to the sculptor – but that, like Novalis – the poet is also the philosopher in that he has only himself as a character but he is the mad philosopher in that he slashes wildly and from beyond-dictates; the poet obeys only the wildest whispers – and here is the difference between the poet and the metaphysician. The poet no longer runs thetic narratives through himself and attempts to find a logic, or a thread of true or real or provable life-information. The poet is entirely within creation; in this sense there is no created reality for the poet as the poet is a procedural thing; as such is immanently fluxual – existing without the grounds of even the poem. The poet does not accept even the greatest truths or deny the most absurd lies about himself or the world; he does not endure anything that has been other than to say that it might be now otherwise; the poet gambles his phenomenal existence in and upon engagement with the pneumenological – staking the power of the breath into and through the process of poetic creation; the hitherto unforeseen possibility of life – emergent yet again in changed form. The poet must gamble in this way precisely because of the supra-sensational conditions of the poetic existence – in that it emerges entirely from beyond the dictates which compose that-which-is; it emerges as time and not history, speech and not language, being and not self. This poetic existence is already having been stripped of the phenomenological; traceable constructs of before the poem, that which (‘certainly’) was.

This is to say that the poet bangs his head against the limits of himself and flails wildly in a dance against the limit which is the phenomenological self against the imagined limit of

world. Each, the self and the world, in the moment of poetry are stripped of their masks to reveal a channel of conjuring. The poet, in his behavior as an intimate awareness of this becoming as it composes him, too composes from this point and is in this sense always emerging in that he has not once emerged from the state of poetry which produces what are called ‘poems’, or works of art. It is in this way that the poetic existence is an existence on the threshold of a dwelling and that there are no habitable or hospitable climes produced in and through the poetic condition but notes on being on the threshold, or remarks upon the marks made that etch the poem into being – the marks made which are the marks of man. The poet is writ first; the extreme comedy and tragedy of having- been-writ is the poetic condition of human existence – of Being having emerged from itself in the figure of the ‘human’, and as such as having-emerged, having-limit. The emergence, or movement into existence as a state of become-into-light is a movement of Being into physis. It is in this way that Being takes forms like shells and discharges them when it has become them as itself. The acting force of Being moves through masks of beings; as such, encounters and re-encounters itself through and by way of the artificially imposed limits which are limits of physis as embodiment. Being perpetually satirizes itself and remarks upon itself, the mark, by way of encountering itself differantly. In this sense, Being does not understand itself but by way of a mis-en-scene of becomings.

That Being does not ever become itself is the perpetual deferral of meaning as becoming, proper. The unfinished condition of Being is precisely the poetic condition in that the poetic condition does not exist but as inherently creative; thus the ground of aeons and poetic construction alike are the grounds of absence; the appeal to the abyss of absistence, or that which was, is, and will be. The poet, in recognition of his mortal condition as that of being ‘man’, does not despair and is beyond-despairing, as he recognizes that his mortal condition is the condition of ‘man’, and is not the condition of Being – that which he, more truly, is.

He sees this movement to and from phenomenal existence and pneumenal absistence; seeks to come into further commune with it and can only do so by way of surrendering to the poetic condition, the condition which is also the condition of Being. In this way the poet has relinquished, at last, the hopes of the philosopher in that there might be (with hubris) overstanding in regards to the absolutely creative and absolutely destructive movement of Being through the body of time. The poet is thus the artist of surrender; the artist of artful surrender who submits to Being in and as an understanding of his condition fundamentally aligned to the process of Being as creative becoming; he does not reach to supercede Being, but instead to exist intimately among it as a becoming-happening which transforms him without resistance.

For the poet to resist would be to no longer be a ‘poet’, in that the resistance to understanding is the assertion of knowledge. If this were to be the created state of man, he would exist; become absolutely stone. And yet, this is the modern condition – an imagined one – of many men. To actively resist the creative process of Being is to (attempt) to forget the condition of ‘man’ as a figuration of Being – ‘a brief candle’ of configuration. And yet, this is the ignorant state which conducts the affairs of world and self – the state which is being-without-poetry, or the loss of meaning, in that meaning has already become ‘materiality’, or phenomenally emerged. The vision of the poet is an altogether a different matter, as a blind seer like Tiresias the poet sees-through matter as a process of existence and absistence and instead has an ontological as Being-oriented sight, a sight which does not condone a historical understanding of events as emergences and existence – but instead moves toward a vision of time which is perpetually becoming and in apocalyptic crisis as being-on-the-cusp of appearing absolutely and disappearing absolutely. The poet, then, is always in the verge of discovery; a terrible discovery which would be the forever ceasing and the forever creasing of Being as it reveals its skin to his world of forms. It is, as if, for the poet the metaphysical vision is of the process of

formation; in this way the poet is always the first and the last to the epochal shift – the one who looks forward and backward toward the bookends of time as absolute obliteration and absolute birth of something else. This, the state of poetry, is also the state of revelation – as Being revealed unto itself by way of an open channel, or conduit. The poet as a hollow shell is the man who has understood that he does not yet even exist; thus there could not be a claim he could make to the existence of anything – that these things of his life are shifting upon their nonexistent grounds; having-breathing and may yet disobey even those sacred man-observed laws of physis and Nature. For the poet has disobeyed his own most sacred laws and has gone against himself; his own limits have been proven false in the movement of being-pulled inward towards itself – a movement which perpetually shatters outward formulations to reveal that which must absist; that which continues to persist in the thrust toward Being becoming existent to itself.

It is in this way that differance functions to create a mosaic of Being as becoming which is this face of Being – a shifting face which pulls in despair, puffs in arrogance, and withdraws in reluctance to be seen. The mask of Being is cast beneath the faces of all men and all things; all things revolt out from under themselves as the changing dictum which is the only law of Being – in that it shifts as creative. The very subjectivity of man revolts from beneath itself as that which is as a doing, an acting, a movement; thus is unidentifiable other than in that it refuses to ally itself with existence or absistence and yet is entirely between them and becomes most itself by way of the midpoint between the two spheres of apparance and disapparence. The poet, then, is always on the precipice between existing finally and absolutely ceasing to exist; slipping in and out of consciousness and thus grips and is gripped by the mutuality of his changing self construct and the conductor of his self construct – or the shifting grounds that require his being to change and shift. The poet, disregarding the shallow and forcible stases of human law and ‘logic’, obeys the logic of the soul entirely and thus allows himself to be utterly

changed in order to more truly understand that which he is. It is in this way that, throughout the ages, the poet stands alone at the summit of himself and humanity – in that he has become truly human in so many ways that others consider absolutely inhuman. The poet has become the flesh and changed the flesh in a game of testing his own limits and moving beyond them and embattling the furthest point of his own existence and absistence; he has relinquished his will entirely and thrust it absolutely toward the furthest point – and he is at war as a game with himself as Being and he is at peace as a game with himself as Being. Having undergone these journeys of extremity, the poet cannot take his self formation seriously because it does not exist long enough to be taken as anything other than a shifting ground – like all Being; the poet comes into intimacy with Being in that he wears the mask of Being as this being-of-now – an already abandoned shell.

The poetic work of being is always ‘there’, in the sense that it lies just beyond the threshold of the en-visioned ‘moment’ of phenomenal existence; in that it lies in the coming breath, the be-coming immanence of existence itself as that which is irrevocably altered by that which is phenomenally given and pneumenally taken away by each breath of cosmic Being. It is in this way that the poetic work of being is itself a habitable state as being-beyond-oneself and yet moving en- formed. The paintings of Francis Bacon most accurately represent this state – this state that is not presented, as it is becoming enfleshed with form and moving and thus partially depresented – both within and without the door. The fluxual state of being is the state of the poem in that the most poetic thing is not yet entirely a thing and yet it is being born, head emergent and thus partially evisced and almost happening. It is this possibility that is imbedded in the raw form as the form with spiritude, or the chiseled possibility of the poetic humanity. It is this work of poetry which is the truest work in that it is concurrent and simultaneous with the work of Being at large as that which births loss, or creates with the movement which necessarily and perpetually sheds beings. The work of Being is itself

figured in the sculptor, the poet, and the dancer as themselves creative forces which are not subjectivities – or masks of the being; masks the being undertakes as and in action. The movement of the formal concerns of the body into remarking upon itself as creative, gestural movement is the becoming of Being which is the breathing universe, the bird’s song, the sprouting tree. It is as such that this is the dictate, too, of man; a dictate which commands him to lose himself unto the extremity which is the ecstasy which threatens absolute abandonment in every moment; an extremity and ecstasy which reveals him to be nothing but a becoming – a becoming which is neither here nor there, phenomenal or pneumenal; yet enmeshed in the frictive tension between the two impulses which chisels him from the stone of his birth and the stone of his death.

There are a thousand disclosures: The pockmarked cry of the rat The whore philosopher’s syphilitic yalp And the tyrant mountain At last Shedding its skin.

There are a thousand disclosures And beneath their slip I sit - paused, Immersed in my own language. The catacomb of being, where the river remains Slivered out from the entrails which spoke Water, The elemental thing which remarks upon the sayer Like fire, or rain. From the image of the sky, out from the slip of these disclosures, I, too, slip - Illusions unto being.

Now these meditations cannot be sold, The pauper who holds hands with the merchant - In an agora as empty as the great palaces And empires of old. The whole world is an agora of poems - Dead poems, salted poems, poems preserved in the juice of old stones and yet Dead… horribly dead Lost of themselves but as corpses.

The poetry flies from this place, Red like a combatant, flushed - The poetry flies from this place, Red from the hold And abandons the shell of the poem. Artful, the poetry flies - from the ground which is assured; The given dignity of things.

I have read the newspapers today and lost my desperate holding; Even I was relinquished from my grip -

And in the terror that turns my body to ice I measured god with masked footfalls. How many steps have I taken then, barren, And pregnant with the emptiness of my time? The emptiness that steals across my body like a shadow and promises me Infinitudes Of muted speech. The ghosts of my time, these men - Struggling to emergence And yet stilled by the hard current of language, Their skin beaten back and finished.

If I have cast my body, bronze or stone In a green field - what of it? Artistry - What of the march of humanity over the black hills ragged, in the dusk and falling Over itself - All my fellow men are drunk, Or headed home, on the way to some pub, and tired of angel-speak. The poet today fails to entertain; immersed in revelation, Turning over the blanket which has covered his face. Upon this stage of Today, An attic of abused things - I proclaim this loud abyss amidst the jeering traffic, this heart-song rent From my breast by the snatch of language, The loud syncope which has told me my desires: This world of human hearts and minds Spun into the chaos of twilight. Today, there is no more logic for me but this whisper of a poem - moved like a breeze or an insect chant; Fallen like the crest of a wave into my lap. I might throw it on a canvas, or beyond myself, All tagging and contortions. Without clocks Goes this setting birdsong.

I have been gifted this face and this mouth - Peeled back from tree bark and painted with nectar, The lips spun from cherrywood and the teeth from beneath the earth, Saplings of stone.

The mouth has watched the blooming unfold its buds, Cresting over the ground of the earth and risen From hidden seed. I have turned to my other side, blackened moon Away from the sun and perilously close to being lost; Yet cradled by a dark hand like an infant.

So the guitarist strums! His instrument humming the torrenting rages; His mouth in agony against the black sky; The mass huddled about him, Catching his song with their spread holes. All desperate! And preparing for the word - Come like a thundercrack and lightening The mouth of the one whose organs are like strings, the one with no name but fire And birthings!

This epoch has thrust its language upon me like a foreboding dream, Telling of its past and yet containing some utterly new imagining - Shorn upon the mosaic of its becoming. Through the shattered window of its eyes I peer out - like a leper or a soul Upon its birthing, Loud and violent in a tempest of color - Its machinations yet unknown to itself. Will the poet then come and dare language; Roll the bones bearing his insignia? What aleatory thing has man become? In the midst of his revealing, Thrown into the light of himself And torn from what was once his world-being. The light in which he is in the throes of his skin - The shattering of his eyes and the illusory boundaries of Sense!

Man has become this new thing - appendage unto himself, Into the realm of his Extension which is his world -

Immersed in his dying hole and buried Of his own volition. He will not rise from the covers to approach the spirit of his time - the spirit that Chants like a madman or an omen - casting him from his dreaming bed in a fit of Fear! No - he will not rise, He will turn instead toward the balm of other things; He will risk a slower blindness.

What then of the poet? The one who spins himself of a thousand turns, So gyrating that he is like a planetary body unto himself, a personal gravity? Well, his dwelling is in the poem - Unfolding and yet groundless - assured only in his meeting the poem, Barren, and not a word to his name. The poem will supply him his true form - Supple and buoyant, raising him to the subtle altitudes which do not look down upon the world of things But instead regard the ecstatic. He is no exile! All of the city night, unmarked alleyways and sullen balconies – Bowed out of use before the coming dawn, The poet runs faster, spins brighter, and folds the materiality like a piece of paper - Upon itself, collapsed - and Being laughs at this stageplay.

Today, man is preoccupied with all things; thus he misses his true nature like a Train - he is at the station and the interstices of his soul and yet he does not board The venture! Why? Is it because man has become afraid of himself?

He stands in himself, remarked upon by the world shadow - Already collapsing beneath the weight of his imagined aggressor - At a perpetual front of war.

He is attacked from the east, the west, the north, the south; Thus man is huddled about his being like a deathbed. So he counts his days! always at risk and yet never venturing anything of greater Value. Man comes to the table with his clothes, his boots, his coin - And yet man never wagers the bounds of his being - The rockface of his soul. For we cannot wager that which we do not know, Or have otherwise come into relationship with Like a soldier encounters his opposite and marks his flesh On the battlefield littered with himselves. So what do they wager today? Arms, legs, and never the heart - the heart lies unspoken in an early grave, Shuttered and mourned by none - In a cove where the water of time rises and falls, In a cove where the moon pays strange visitations.

So will I, the poet, walk the street today and remain drunk on the wine of myself? Wine I have told you that I will drink; that I will not spill all over my chest in Overdrunkenness and languish in the sun? Not wine of the body That has sat and fermented in dark casks in a cellar Where I, too, was buried And emerged - one hand raised toward the coming light and the other, sallow Toward the chiseled face of what is to come for me, and you! Yes, I will trudge past death like I am minding my own business, on the way to a lover’s room Death like another open door upon an alleyway where they are unloading the fish truck Or death like that. I will climb inside the body; that venture, yes - Having dug down so deep into the sediment of the flesh that I will alight again on That sacred aether of the heart And float it up to words for the men of my time, And all this tide of being. This, I wager!

For I have been born a thousand times and known breath like an oarsman; I have scaled the veins like a mountain and i have lost my bearings so utterly into absistence. I became spirit, and now I work these fingers again, stride again; Propound ridiculous reasons again with the rest of you - Factory workers, tradesmen - All these iterations of the human thing that has emerged from the belching breech Which has caught the wind of spirit And now speaks today Evermore.

THE HIGHER IDENTITY

The higher identity is allowing oneself to become the vehicle to and through the immanent poetry, the vehicle of oneself which is the evershifting, everchanging poem – the many definition ‘thing’ which allows its thingness to perpetually redefine the shape and form it takes without the desire to sculpt the poem from the self which is existent at this moment. The higher identity, then, is the unchanging thing which changes absolutely; by way of change encounters a new method of being itself, through which it becomes being itself.

The higher identity is thus beyond any manifestation; includes all outward manifestation but is always that which eludes definition, escapes sedimentality, and flows free from form but at any moment could arrive disguised in form differently. This higher identity is fundamentally of the interwovenness of poetry and the poem; the dialogue of the spirit and the vessel which is inescapably whole of itself; unbroken; unbreakable. For there is at last nothing and everything outside the higher identity, the thingness which composes each iteration of the contained and uncontained self – sculpted in a different manner, conveying a strange and new feeling, or returning to a tearful remembrance or caged futility. These cycles of feeling as masks occur within the higher identity as Being; identification with the higher identity as such is an identification with and apart from the cycles of feeling which spin in and out of enlightened aspect like planets and bodies in the sun and dark light.

The higher identity is at once the receptive and waiting poem-vessel of the body and the poetry itself which hovers above the vessel like hot air or lightning prepared to enter the poem-vessel at any given moment. This entrance and evocation and exit and revocation is the hymn of Being; the existence and absistence through which Being draws itself close to itself (being), locks mouths with flesh and soul, and obtains distance by and through which to remark upon the

revelation of existence which is also the body kissed by soulful feeling. The revelation of the soul to the body is the new word with many definitions and yet the new word that tells Being something fundamental of itself; to itself, from itself – the whisper of the soul risen up through the chamber of the body and presented like a figuration. This is the eternal joy of the higher identity – that it itself is never fully formed; that rather it is perpetually on the cusp, edge, effervescent of its own self as beingness; the language that is its world is the thing which flowers from the breath which is the coming and going, the existent word and the absistent spirit-essence of the word as beingness rising again to the roof of the stars to be transfigured once more.

To identify with the higher identity is thus to evoke a state of perpetual and total submission to the process of poetry and the poem as the creative-making of life which is also called poesis – a process of becoming and making perpetually anew, a process of becoming and making perpetually anew from the remains of nothing and everything which is the moment returned, with new demands, new language, and new creative potentiality. The poem’s demands are like an eternal spring, come again differently – with a hive of languages which themselves sprout creative interpretations of their once was place. The moment of the poem is at once the ground wherein the soul touches the earth, the clay which gives form and receives the soul like a seed; the ground whereof the sprouting of a- new iteration of being rises, wild and reaching toward light once more. To come into the higher identity is to no longer pull towards elsewhere, but to instead find oneself enshrined wholly within and as the poem as unfoldment; an unfoldment which is not determined from ‘without’; furthermore, knows nothing whatsoever of a ‘without’-state. This unfoldment is never without the arch of Being, whose ouroboros reaches into the dark and light of the violent joyous sproutling and the dormant winter of the seedling.

This process, as such, is the liberation of man from the terms and conditions of self-imposition which he has created

and solidified within himself as a perpetually remembered history which enslaves him to a past which has gone with the changing of the seasons of the poem. The demands of the poem have long since killed man’s former conception of him to himself; yet he clings to the memory of his former conjuring like it is itself life. In doing so, he resists the winter which murders him and the spring which resurrects him, the kiss which utterly transfigures him, and the separation which reflects his coming light. Man’s coming self is always he; even as the spirit flies from the body; man’s coming self is always the poetry which scatters new poems like pollen upon the fertile ground of man’s becoming – the earth to and from whence he emerges and returns. To identify with the poem itself is to, in one light, see the humanity incarnate as this man, in this moment, and yet to trace this humanity to and from the source of itself – the rise and fall of the flesh, its empires, its imagined burdens, its role in the street play of the world; to observe this emergence and ecstatic leaving as, itself, the play of the poem; the poetry which comes and goes from it.

It is then that we do not ask, ‘what is Being?’ or fear that coming light or night of existence and absistence but that we observe it all as ourselves; in the poem of immanence it is not to say ‘what am I’, but rather, ‘what now?’ – to remark and reflect not upon the subjectivity of Being but rather to observe the primary directives of the poetry as a becoming act; to play one’s part joyfully; with the knowing smirk of the actor who comprehends his role in the eternal unfoldment. In this sense there is nothing that happens that shatters Being, or the higher identity, but, rather, all that happens is an unfoldment of Being to itself; man to himself – and that this perpetual unfoldment is a journey, a venture to and through which man loses nothing, but gains everything by way of experiencing himself. So when this occurs what man must do is to approach the poem-making in and from a state of attunement, or ability to listen to the dictates as they come in and out of the poem-vessel by way of the poetry like a radio; this attunement can only be done by way of the being unto Itself. For who could tell this actor

where to stand on the stage and how to gesture, or to say his soliloquy but the director that is also him? For this role is so unique and necessary to himself that he must hear it from his own mouth; in his own words, whispered down through him as experience; down through him as a chamber which eternally gives and receives itself unto itself.

The poet clears the chamber of the poem to receive poetry by way of letting go, releasing, and returning the old spirit of the old time to itself; to the sky and the stars as the invocation of the poem-speak from the mouth; the born- poem flies and dies in the air and resounds and is reabsorbed by the a-temporal, by the Atlas of disapparence. He takes the poem again into the fold of the poetry; regards the transfigured language – and there is again the sly face of the poem come from the sky to be seen and heard by the astute man – the astute man who we call the poet. This giving and taking is itself that which must be allowed to be performed within the poet as vessel as a process of perpetual and immanent purgation; a fire within him which must be allowed to breathe the oxygenated air, stoking itself with the starlit spirit; raring and loud of its own power; then exploded and imploded into the rare stone which we call the poem – the body of the poet. For it is that both the poet and that which we call ‘the poem’ are chiseled and transformed by this occurrence; this, by way of understanding, is how the poet and the thinker come to the higher identity of Being. For the higher identity is a true shelter; a true dwelling of and for all men and all poets and all things and no-things, a dwelling to and from which they fly to shore and fly again to the heavens; a migratory dwelling which moves itself through (language) and jettisons itself as (language); that which burns men and their ecstatic and effervescent speech alive; that very burning which is the creation of the speech, the word, the body; the breath which transforms into and through life and death alike.

THE METAPHYSIC OF EXISTENCE

The syncope is the petrification of life from within the midst of itself.

II.

The ‘individual’ is incarnated with and from a configuration of forces (at once physical and metaphysical, flesh and stone) as and at the time, the time which is always incarnation. The now-born and now-born again ‘individual’ is continually subjected to an everchanging time (the demand-of birth) which is the new conditional demand upon the being as a changed-face. The individual then, is perpetually individuated in and as the coming-time. The individual is asked to wear the mask of the changed time as the changed time envelops him and becomes him, too, entirely; to play at this changed being-of-time, a being of a thousand faces who remains forever whole in and as metaphysical Time absolute.

III.

The individual immersed in poetry as the becoming-of- Time allows ‘the self’ (as eternally mutable, mutating, a-con- structur-ing) to play out as an ceaseless-unfoldment; observes this unfoldment as a ‘play’, a purely aesthetic movement. The human being, then, is a compendium of forces-as-times only realizable in that it realizes itself as itself – Being, proper; thus transcends the categorical reality imposed from without it as the conceptual beings, the screen of the life of the being as imagined-separative.

IV.

Without imagination (without separation from the reality of Being as eternally enthroned within and as itself), the being assembles itself physically (aesthetically) in relation to the metaphysical dictum of itself - the whisper of language (the house of Being) which is the full and unbroken command of

and from within; this command emerges upon the dissembly of the without-forces which otherwise would determine the being from itself; the being-with-concept. The without forces, in short, are the conceptions of being-from-itself. This is to say the instrument of poetry produces lies that are only truths in their absolute invocation as breeching-speech.

It is then that the being-with-concept is a world unto itself composed of self resistance in the name of self image; that the being-without-concept is a world of absolute free movement of self through itself (as medium); the metaphysical understanding of forces at work as channels of creative unfoldment and possibility of and for physis. Finally, both of these beingness-states are time observant; the former is time bound, while the latter is time cognizant. The being-without-concept is water taking necessary form to ‘face’ the time.

VI.

By way of and through tenses and releases; speech and silence of the gods-as-forces of coming-time moving through the vessel of the body, the syncope of being is revelated to and through itself as the poetic act of breeching-speech which evolves man to and through himself as higher being. Here, higher being is nothing more than resolution of the higher and lower order in being-enthroned-within itself as absolute communion by way of the Timely ‘word’ as utterance from the instrument prepared being, ready to receive the momentous occasion which is the free embodiment of the time as whirling movement.

VII.

Here, a time immaterialism: an eternal destitution of ‘the thing’ to reveal its ‘thingness’; a phenomenal state of emergency which is really a perpetual state of emergence of reality to and through itself - the phenomenal vessel which is

the incarnate being - a reality which is always already metaphysical as it is in passage; revelatory in that the revelation of ‘thingness’ reveals the thing to itself; furthermore, reveals ever-more-truly the nature of being to itself by way of perpetual, categorical loss. Categorical loss is the loss of category by way of the loss of time; the inability to cipher the message of the gods. This loss of time is the syncop-ic emergence of that which Being truly is, revelated to itself by way of the emergence which is also a loss of itself. This wounding by way of a pseudo-nomic severence is also existence.

VIII.

This is what it is to come into the absolute-free creation which is also the creation of ‘the human being’.

OHNE KUNST

The sealed language where nothing emerges Drags its consciousness by the gored throat Down into this room of celebrations Where the dead air ferments life’s strangulated Passions – Where her hand is forever my own.

The moon reflects purgatory light about the windows; The marionette of the body and the playhouse world lie still Upon the kitchen floor – silent, exalted Hangmen of the gods.

Come, Time – turn the shadow dial; Section the body Into these barren solitudes.

EMOTION AND FEELING IN POETRY

That which raises strife as the event of appropriation; That which adjoins Dante in the Gates of Dis.

The emotion is what sets the poem into locomotion in and through the necessity of feeling the emotion through itself; seeing the movement of the emotion through the chamber of the body. The poem itself provides a vehicle through which there might be the powered engine of emotion to be seen through by way of free language, or language which speaks for itself. There is, here, no ‘self’ involved in this utterance and becoming but the gods of force and feeling which batter the being of the body about and thus alter its winds and weather. The poem itself, therefore, is the entirety of the human being in that it is the entirety of the potential of the human being bound up in the immanence of elucidation. The being speaks itself through the tempest which formulates it yet again; the being speaks itself more truly through the tempest which is the formulation of the time. The time is always more than the human being in being that horizon which rises over man and yet intimates him with utterances which draw him evermore towards himself by way of these trials of the mind, body, and soul which we call ‘living’ – a drag of Being.

For it is of the essence to see the feeling through into the openness of the poem if not only to clear it from the vessel of the being; to pass the time like a stone through Time; the rhythmic contractions and contortions which create the possibility of passage from, of, and for this moment into the next. It is that the poem is a fundamental form of navigating becomings; in this navigatory possibility of free language which does not yet know itself completely, the poem is always already an unfinished movement from the breech of language – a motility which acknowledges its timeliness; thus stands as an adequate and interpenetrative companion to the blind dog which it pulls upon its leash – philosophy. For philosophy cannot do that which poetry promises in its absolute, utter, and essential existence as that process which

materializes and de-materializes all ‘things’: which is to see into time; to peer into stone in order to utter something of the stone-ness; the thingness which remains as Time even as the time is come and gone. Poetry runs with the rhythm of the time as expressed breath; as that which solders the sense and the feeling to the hip of the time as the epoch of this ecstasy dies and yet says something of it in its absolute allegiance to becoming – unaesthetized.

For it is that poetry is only aesthetized in history, an analgesic applied to that which is already gone in stone – in a history which is simultaneously a language for that which has already been said first in and at the front of the poetic. The attempt to reabsorb the poetic into the fold of man is, of course, the reactionary tool of most men who observe becomings as, absolutely, materialities; thus, remain to and from the sphere of pure material. That which is essential to the thought of the poem is lost to us; this is to say that which was essential to be thought in the transition from this moment to the next – a thought which is also necessarily catalyzed by the pressurization of time as it slips from the bowels of itself into a materialization (the time from Time itself). Poetry is at once the midwife and immediate inheritor of this new time, which it brings into firm being by way of a riddling rhythm which sounds out the time to itself; in this way stands in the breach between the word and the sounding of the word – the moment at which Frankenstein’s sectioned monster of bastard corpse parts is struck by the technic lightning and animated to its own secret accords. For the monster of the time cannot yet be known until it has spoken itself and proclaimed its true intentions by way of the completed movement which is of course the fulfillment of the Promethean composition – the bringing of fire, the trial of the being brought back against stone, and the return of the materialization of light back to the star sky. The monster of the time reveals humanity to itself by embodying all that humanity is and cannot yet see (or perhaps refuses to), in that the created time becomes a mirror to and through which the deep rooted feeling of man is related back to

himself by way of the language which speaks itself – the poem.

For that this time has been created promises an infinity of changeability; charges poetry with the highest responsibility which is everything and nothing – the possible charge which is the absolutely generative and degenerative; the midwifery of the pregnant composition which always even now hinges toward decomposition and the revelation of what remains in the wake of the violent birthing of this time to the next. In the charge of poetry lies the charge of the something- essential; the whispered element which passes through the materialities of fire, water, earth, and air – the whispered thing that remains and re-lies upon the as-yet-unseen; this is the domain of poetry as revelation of the psychic being. For if the poetry comes it comes as a distillation, a compression which is greater than even that of simulated weights of compressed gas; earth, and the generated bombs of man and volcanic eruptions and plate shiftings of the floor beneath him – it comes as an eruption of consciousness which is also an irruption, an interruption which is also an explosion and implosion of atomic consciousness toward itself – the cosmic totality which is also Time; the touching hand which brushes the fingertips of Time and there is recognition in the touching – a recognition which is the language of Time expressed through itself, the vessel of the being speaking Time. It is thus that the rhythmic opening is the creative act of poetry which allows the sense of the philosophical (the thinking-feeling-living being speaking time) to emerge by way of the vibratory gape which is the opening, the hole sustained by the syncope of the being revelation as primary rhythm – to itself. The locomotion of the poem is the essential locomotion of being through and to itself by way of its becoming; the poet comes into this locomotion by dancing to the hip of Time; this dance of the dervish is the splitting of the materia and the psyche; in this splitting-wounding the word produced is also that which must heal the wound between being as that which produces it – becoming the disjunct interpenetration which is also the weaving of Time through itself – a stitch which is also a

suture, a refraction which is also a friction of the rhythmic opening and the meaning-being-thing which travels through it. The word produced, by way of this very elucidation, retains the wet-essence of that hold of Time which produced it by way of the rhythmic opening; emerges dripping with the retention of the spirit of the time, proper.

For it is one of the greatest horrors of poetry that the poem emerges deformed, or that it is something perhaps even more or less than that which produced it – or worse – that it is precisely ourselves that emerge from the underground of the language expressed to itself; that the produced-thing of the poetic movement of being through itself is precisely the brief moment of recognition which is the mirror which revelates the true condition of man being swept away by himself; that which he most truly is, incarnate Time. It would, of course, be in that the tradition of what might be called literary poetry and prose that the two most striking revelations of this very process of grotesque revelation which is the becoming-consciousness of mankind to and through itself as a (de-)composition occur with Percy and Mary Shelley, in their respective works Ozymandias and Frankenstein. Percy’s demarcation of man is in the absolute decomposition of his works to the sands of time, or the degeneration of the ‘great works’ of man (including his own) to the pathic monument of a broken form amidst the sands which ever-still encroach upon that very statue of Novalis’ promise of the philosophy, poetry, and art – sculpted and chiseled atop the pedestal of the raw man. Mary’s journey of man is, of course, her Frankenstein’s monster as the truest nature of man; an incarnation of man which follows (by way of a technic) a more ‘accurate’ movement to the hip of the metaphysical movement of Being into materiality, a movement of a technological man who is truly modern in that he is like Orpheus reincarnate, returned from fragmentation to the world of men and yet more truly man than other men because he is born of other means. The great work of poetry as the fundamental creation is both also these works of the Shelleys, in that in and through the zones of poetry the free language roams and constructs man

in many forms and de-forms; that in these zones of poetry there is the perpetual deformity and reformity of Being proper which is the derangement and rearrangement of limbs as a linguistic a-con-figuration which is the wildness of speech unreachable by and to sense – the frozen climes to which the monster finally retreats; the sands of Time to which the epochs of man finally resolve; it is in these climes of extremity to and from the true language emerges of terrible realization of that which is at once of this time and of Time, itself – the beingness which travails.

For it is told also like this that Hercules is all men (into fragmentation) and the trials of Hercules are all men (into fragmentation). The very becoming zone of ‘man’, proper, is assigned to the demi-god Hercules, the one who embodies the movement between the zones of propriety as materiality and yet retains the essence of the gods as forces moving within and through and about him as erogenous zones of feeling and emotion which propels him through ecstasies and emanations; that Hercules is that which remains, finally, as the One which is many, the successor to himself in changed form by way of his tasks which are always and again the facing (being given face) of himself in and as alteriorities. For the horrible realization in the work of the Shelleys is that man is the decimated and decomposed sands of his empires and even the broken monuments of man that persist even after his demise which stand as monuments of absolute pathetic irony. It is too, this with Mary’s work in that the metaphysical son of man, born of his creative wife of technics – embodies man even more truly in his meta- organic formation from the formerly organic parts which stand as, literally, a restitution and recombination of the aspects of man into a changed form, energized by an enlightening and yet simulated difference which proves him, ever more truly, to be of and from the fold of men. Frankenstein and Hercules alike emerge as bumps, or revelatory syncopes of meaning – folds emanating outward from the creasing skin which is the cosmic exertion of Man; the entirety of man’s striving toward his true form, Being- Time as itself beyond-in-human. These emanations come as

deformities from that which is understood as man to teach man that he is beyond himself; it is in this way and sense that they come as fundamentally poetic forms – forms that reach into the manifold valleys from which they are created- emergent, and jump with ever so slightly higher altitudes toward themselves – jumping out of that which they remain within – as impressions of Being from and (always returning) to itself.

Percy Shelley’s finality of man is a depiction of the end of Time as a revelation of total equality; the poetic moment in and at which sounding and silence reach an accord in stillness which is a revelation as a leveling – the accord of the end of the poem which is the moment between movements; the sputtering exhalation of this human epoch into its inhuman utterance as the next which shows the former the full and ghastly extent of its shadow-dreaming. For with both Percy and Mary Shelley’s works, this is what we speak of when we speak of revelatory poetry – the poetry of revelation which is in tune and time with the revelation of the Time to itself; a revelation which, by way of a listening- catching, tells something of this very action to itself – an eternity which is also an hour.

THINKING-THROUGH-BEING

Through the productive channel, emergence itself.

In becoming through itself, the being becomes perpetually more of itself; in this becoming becomes less of that which it-which-was, that it sheds the era of its conformation and into the deformation of its present moment; the moment which straddles its confirmed beingness and contortioned becoming, that precisely which is always itself proper as process but that which it never becomes but as in a looking back upon the breaking form-hands of the former. It is that the becoming thing flees itself perpetually; itself which becomes both history and language as conceptual formations of detritus and remain(der)s, none and neither of which any longer contain the essential beingness as becomingness which flees the scene of the former – the scene of the dying epoch body. For that, with Michelet, the dream has left the body is indistinguishable from the spirit leaving the body for another disinhabitance, or permanent migration interrupted with a syncope from within the heart of being which is a beat figured being from Becoming which retains the light and shadow of a flash of the Being becoming in the mirror of itself, a flash of true soul given and taken to form.

It is precisely this channel that is both submerged and emerged as that-which-is and however entirely strange in that it perpetually alters itself. In this perpetual alteration, the alterioration which is also an encounter of interjecting difference, the interjecting expression is that thing which emerges violently; in this violent emergence the time remarks upon itself as Time – as the fleeing-thing-from-itself which populates its wasteland with degenerate forms as ‘world’. This is also how it comes to know itself as being- within-form, with all of the violent brevity of being ripped away from itself endlessly – as the production of loss, or absence. That the Being-Time produces only nothing as a given-loss is the paradox of emergence which the being grapples with as the inheritor of that which has already

abandoned itself; that which is already lost to itself as that which it mistakes itself for – a cognizable formation (a given materiality), and not already degenerated time. For that the being beats its rhythms are always already death rhythms, death gestures; wild accusations of being, proper, levied upon the rapidly disapparent and re-populating shiftings of its own condition – a condition which is perpetually debilitated unto Being. This debilitation of the being is the violent emergence and receding quality of spirit unable to hold form as but in the immanence of the creative moment; the time which comes across Time and in this coming- across already becomes past-time. It is that, then, there is not beings but the condition of Being, not poetry but the condition of Poetry; not time but the condition of Time, not language but the condition of Language – as media of emergency. The emergency is precisely the state, or condition, of Being through itself, an hour which is conditioned upon its fulfillment – in that the hour is fulfilled and affirmed and understood as Being within itself.

The expiration of spirit is the last line of poetry, the last line of history, the last breath of this being-form; the conditional state of Being as enthroned but for a moment in the flesh which it grips and rips from itself, a twisting, disrupted motility to and from which language emerges violently as Being. That it is as Being is momentous occasion, a celebration which is a thrusting of spirit into the reception of form and thus absolute birth of the condition of interpenetrative togetherness, or the fulfillment in physis of the metaphysical always- of this time and Time itself. This strangeness is of the fundamental incompatibility of the two impulses as already decomposition (earth, flesh) and the state-of composition as that which is movement (spirit, air). That the two copulate in the incarnation of the poem is itself the end of the both of them and the violent birth which is, the once-more spirit fleeing the corpse of the clay enfleshed earth-thing called the being – the being which is never determined in that it is in flux between two itselves, the incorporated and the disincorporated. It is in this way that the poem is simultaneously disjected from the

griplessness of that which lies before language and is also entangled in the ruined-language which is being pasted or being past the limits of itself already elucidated and thus remained in the corrupted.

Now that the sould could haunt the body of the poem is that if the body has not been sufficiently abandoned and left to the mass grave of history; that the poem has not been absolutely remained – and it is in this way that the entire world is haunted poems of incompletion which yet hold the seeds of the enspirited moment which thrust them into existence and yet as they crumble phenomenally in and to and as the world ‘about’ them. That the world is ‘about’ poems is the sheath of runoff language which has remained and populated the that-which-is as remaining spectres still with breath; that these spectres which are the poetic thrusting into being, or that they are springs of being – do not yet cease to exist in so much as they exist less conspicuously, less abruptly, and less definitely as themselves. This is what the birth of the new poem does as like setting off a bomb or a thrumming of spring air as a climbing out from the earth, air, and fire – the swelling belly of becoming and the discarded ‘thing’. This is to say that the time of this thing is now and yet that this time is populated by the often inconspicuous fleeings of the long winters of that which this thing once was. This is not history – but rather the haunting of Time unto itself; the encroachments of the dark body of time about this time as the absolute ulteriority which is the ‘nothing’ which is really pregnant shades of darkness about ‘the being-state’ of immanence – the shed bodies which are not yet even dirt, sand, dust, particle; even then, these particulars remain touched by light and impregnated.

The time is then an explosive and implosive unfoldment of Being into the current-state as an emergenc-y; as an eruption which is visible through and upon the contrast dark which is the not-(yet)-emergent which is also the well steeped in the whole of Being-Time – the whole darkness which is about the eruption of ensouled flesh. This eruption is perpetual and corrosive unto itself, in that it produces the

conditions of spirit-touched-flesh of and as its decadence – a center which cannot hold and yet is perpetually reproduced by the violent spring emergent from the center of Being as the thrusting interpenetrations of soul and form come together and apart. It is that this violent encounter throws of sparks which are beings; that these sparks illuminate the ulterior dark which is also being; the all Time watching the unfoldment of this time within itself.

THE HA(L)VING TO SPEECH

The ha(l)ving to speech is the productive necessity, a mechanical one – of the excess-of being which shines and thus says itself from itself more properly as the way of self- creation expressed physically, with the absolute thrust of the saying as being productive from the hole of itself. The physical thrust of the saying is the compellation, or the impellation of being to and through itself as that which is rhythmically born through the hallway of itself into an emergence from which it is into which it uncertainly also is (not). The true thrust of speech is then that it is the absolute physical movement of utterance-as-being to and through existence as that which shimmers, or wavers into being as the thrust of that which might be into that which is into that which is no longer. The sheer brevity of the speech act is the ultimate act of production in that it produces such violent excesses to and through itself that it cannot exist but as a brush fire unto the very question of itself as that which is always posited in and as – inherently - the speech act. The speech act is always the question of existence affirmed even as it is posited; riddled away from itself in the falling of the phrase from speech into language – from the speech bearing the thrust of pure meaning as expelled life, or made-excess life, into the lexicon of that-which-is already surrounding the question of being. For the question of being is answered again and again in that which it speaks; that which it speaks is always already itself as an emergence which is also a mergence of the indistinguishable productive action of being creating itself.

The word is cut off from the being in elucidation only superficially; in that the gesture resounds the being is that it rephrases it into difference which is also unescaped from the wholeness of Being itself as Time. For the resounding of the word is also the reverberation of a particular coming silence which is also break between elucidations in and through which the coming-time of Being comes again as is? The question which itself becomes an answer in its elucidation.

For it is not the question that is asked but the jettisoning of the expression of being that is both, inextricably, asked and answered immanently as and upon the expression; it is upon the expression that the being-thing is built; that the expression itself is the whole of expressed life, or life- existent. The saying, then, emerges from this place of this- must-be-said – not of a precipitation or pre-articulation of terms; that this-must-be-said is an emergence from a preoccupation of the soul as coming-about; gesticulating into the becoming-time. For this is what it is to speak; this particular function which is urgency and expressed as urgency in that the sheer force of that which is propelled into existence is meaningful in that it is disjected. It is this force which creates ‘meaning’ as an intensity which permeates the whole of the speech-becoming process; it is this intensity which structures the relations of the phrase therein. The very urgency of becoming as an expulsion and impulsion to and from states of being as existences and insistences is that which is the expressed beingness of things and impressed beingness of nothings. It is this urgency which is the tension to and through which being is brought to speech.

It is precisely because ‘something’ must be expressed that being is moved to speech; this something that must be expressed is that which is the being in passage through the hole of rhythm of itself as figuring-of Time. For that disjection is that which speaks and is speaking is that speech is not the mouth, or the earth, but the very expression of and from them as a turning-physical event – a revelation of becoming which is forcibly determined by the coming-time of the ‘thing’ that must be shown. It is that this what-must- be-shown is always already emerging and in this emergence creating mergence with the already determined (while determining) space of physis. It is the something that must be expressed which is then the horizon of language and the absolute limit (even as it is being crested and broken) of being as that which turns over the horizon and produces itself. The fire of these somethings is precisely their irreducible ‘problem’, in that they occur perpetually and

without relent in that the time seeks reunion with Time, proper; that the time seeks language for its absolute absolution and resolution by way of and through language as that which takes it there. Being taken there by itself is of course the paradox of that which is itself and yet becomes beyond itself if not by excess force, or that which it is overbecoming; overdetermining itself with that which moves through it – the tumbling out of ‘beingness’ from Being proper as a wealth, or a surplus of force. This very force jumps Being out of its skin and produces the technic of Being, or the emergent thing which is at once more than Being and almost un-Being. Here, language is the technic which is a perpetual occidental wealth in that it is occluded by that which it creates – itself. Being then creates more of itself by way of language – more of itself in the sense that it becomes more than itself and yet more of itself by way of this excessive becoming.

The ordinary being is not restituted; the ordinary being does not rise from ordination but as reconstituted parts which are altogether not-being, no-more-being; yet are animated by that same force of language which proclaims ‘I am Being’. This re-animation is the work done of force through the body of language which moves it perpetually; reconstitutes, scraps, and ab-charges meaning as spiritude through physis as a compendium of Frankenstein parts – ceaselessly dissembled into strange assemblies and new haunted constitutions. For that this matter is endlessly distributed as parts which are generate and degenerate by and from their relation to the spiritude, this matter is haunted by the auto- motive memory of different function, before-compositions of flesh and fixture. The ordinary being is itself, Being-Time – an ordination which escapes itself becoming so by way of that which haunts itself as itself occidentally. For as it is turned, it turns again to shadow changed by unfoldment light.

my myth is woven deep into the mountains; the copper mines these abandoned solitudes where there is no body called despair or reasons that springboard evermore into the laps of young minds, young minds that have tunneled into the far reaches of the spring that creeps into infant bodies and lays eggs of terrible beauty.

for when they have expressed their truest desire, what of them? if they have hatched and turned to stone and these bodies pregnant now that are on the verge of bursting, their scalding water calling to sacred pools -

i have bathed in the spring and tasted the waters, hot and bitter, even, from the mouth of the mother as she comes, terribly into spring, terribly, into the black open; shaking her children from the bed and out onto the streets their mouths blessed and furrowed, hungry, chasing the dead nothings of their yesterdays which whisper through storefronts and have become these cities, abyss these cities that i trawl with increasing desperation; the word of my mother athene bleeding my ears and making me weep this music, this music that tumbles out like the tale of human affairs, a dice game - come and gone.

SALVATIONS

What do I do now? I do not have the time to sit while the drunkenness wails, or to watch this stumbling in hopes of salvations. The immediacy of this dormant love requires a whispering truth, an immediate understanding to meet its desperation with a true embrace. I must create love because it is the only condition within which I can survive; I must create the truest, most free love because it is the only land that is truly mine; it is the only place I can truly live and breathe. Each of my lovers is together a bridge to love; we bridge to love with our bodies and our hearts and our changing. I must run toward love; I must give open the fields of my being and this page is not enough – these masks are not enough; this foolish striving toward tomorrow is not enough. This is the crisis, that there is not god or some other fold of redemption for myself to slip into, no coat of greater comfort, no shield of touch. The touch is given and taken away; my ecstasy calls, echoes, and dies. I must sound out the name of love to be given greater being; these are my salvations – the salvations that call out to themselves and raise the condition of the human being above itself to remark upon the silliness of its worry, the silliness of its formulation which comes with tending the wildness of the body, pruning it back; indulging it water.

I must go there, but there is not on the streets which are born over the sun to such an extent that they are drowning in radiating heat; the shuttered windows, all these broken hearts and the love that has wound impossible labyrinths about their chests and intestines, curled up, forever undischarged; unexpressed and locked away beneath the codex of the secret language which is only one’s own. I must speak my language wildly and become true love, the truest love that holds nothing and becomes nothing but itself in the becoming but for a shimmering glint; a fold of sunlight on the wood floor, the blinding movement which places me beside myself and in which I take my own hand. For in these moments I am tempted to give myself over to the world, to place my soul in my hand shorn from my throat

and to give it over to another; the imaged place which I have displaced from my being into shadow and possibility. The dormancy of the world holds the opening of my poetry if only I have given the door to the way of a reaching darkness; only if I have swung myself so wide and away that the love which gives me to myself has been given to another; displaced, wanting.

I have walked the streets today and seen the way that things are going in the lives of being; the mannered and practiced paths which it has taken – like the paths that I have taken into these poems, these writings, that have amounted to trenches dug into my soul by gravedigger syllables, trenches in which I have crouched and remarked upon the moon and passed up my skull to myself for further examination. I saw on the streets mothers and children, I saw on the streets the workings of the world – I saw the procession of man to and from the grave and I saw it done gladly; with the calm acceptance of water flowing about the hidden rock of man’s inner life. I saw the fear of other men. I cannot go that way, the way of everyday living; the slow sanity that pounds one into shape – the hammer of time which has struck dumb and mute. I have been called by my flesh which has whispered about itself and done things that are not physical – to that place of the beyond which is ecstasy; to return there, again – there where I must go, again! And to call out from that place and to sleep there soundly and to be embraced by the hands of the wind. I have been called to the touch of animals; I have seen the despair in their eyes too – cages, chambers, whole houses of being which scream for true expression, for the absolute expression of the soul out from every orifice; for the combustion which alights the house of life in blue flame.

For if I have seen this I cannot return to these comings and goings; these bass rhythms which pound the flesh into the soil; these muted holds where there is the mind, the body; the unknown. If I have seen this I cannot abide this regular dwelling of man; that my soul seeps into an unseen night light which glows like a firefly and sings at the pitch of

planetudes – songs of the higher night which lie in the reach and tell of the myths which come again in the hands and feet of men who turn to trees and who descend into the tempest of the heart. I go there – to those realms! I go there and I emerge with this handful of dirt called language, syllable nothings and street dirges – poem songs of walking and the rhythms which emerge three or four or five at a time – the rhythms which are the how-movings of the feet and the swinging of the arms and the stoking engine of the body caught in a whirling which moves it out of itself! This is my truest knowledge, my most human knowledge. What can I speak of what the gods have told me? It is their language, not mine. It is untranslatable.

For if I have come into these moments of strange desperation – desperations which are now so utterly familiar they approach like friends; knocking at my throat and baring myself to speech – desperations which want nothing other than the absolute – I now know what to do with them. There is not now a sense that could be made of it but an emerging; a shadow hand which climbs out of the throat to make a sign and it calls out to nothing; it echoes without a mate, without response in a parallax like a new star in these constellations which I have traced with my fingertips; constellations silent and mute yet winking out from the page-black. I have drawn them on the walls and I have drawn them into flesh; the body has become this aesthetic remains – a pyre of abandon, the place to and from whence I have received these transmissions that have called me to foolish speech!

ODYSSEUS

All that I have is my work; that which I have created etched into the sinew of my body and into these pages – these emergences which have told me the depths of my being alive, truly alive. I have written them into being; as such, I have written myself into being more truly than that being ‘born’ which gave me flesh. I now only continue to unfold with increasing fortitude and focus; remembering the foolishnesses which revealed to me that which I was not – the things which oriented me toward my true self. It is now between me and my mask – the ecstasies which I tremble and touch and retreat from back to desire – the ecstasies which make me truly whole. They have only come in utter self relation.

The highest sculpture is making the human-being.

‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free’ – Michelangelo

The truest words are the words carved into and out of the flesh which the being speaks as speaking itself into itself as existence.

We must have the wild courage to live, and truly live, as ourselves. In doing so we must transcend every artificial limitation of being in the world; the beliefs of others; our own limiting beliefs, and press on evermore into the infinite satisfaction of the deepest nature of who and how we are – our deepest feelings, our deepest intuitions; the strong manifest expression of that which resides within screaming to be released.

Each man who needs salvation more desperately than anything else goes to this place; he goes to this place of beyond; the daring entailed by it. This going beyond is the

going to the place of the impossible by and through which he make-fashions possible as art. This art is the wild gift of desperate men; men so desperate to bring into being their own internal, immortal state that they fashion it as a state on this plane as the expressed. It is for these men that there is no satisfaction but the perpetual climes of greater and greater deeds and works; this is so by way of and through the joy of creation which supercedes the joy of the created thing – the thing that has already become enlightened by the hot sun and the air. It is that this man who is in need of salvation brings about salvation by way of the confrontation of his own will, brought into relation with the sea, the stars, the planetary spheres; that he both pits himself against the ebb and flow of time and declares I am also that!

The work of this man is brought about by way of the facing up against the precipice of his own existence and the thought that ‘yet, I must press on’. Yet, I must find a way through this birthing and deathing of creation into the next phase – I do not want to stop, I do not want to end here; I will not end here! It is the joy of a truly joyous soul which rejoices in the endless journey of itself through itself; does not become attached to its many manifestations. For man himself is a procedure; a brief bout with a point and period in time to and through which he rushes to his fullest expression like a high tide – and bursts over the rocks of his own existence! It is in this way that man becomes something else entirely by way of his own artistry which is always and again a self creation amidst the tempests and blows of mankind.

The sense that ‘I create’ is. It is power and it is also the charge of the living being. That this creation and this creative act be eternal, insistent, and propelled by tremendous force; the thrust of the cosmos. The sense that I speak ‘I create’ is to be one with the creative act which is the apparance and disapparence of all things to and fro. It is in this moment as momentous occasion that I acknowledge and become, sheathed in it, this eternal creation and thus become it, entirely. In doing so, I move charged with it with

the full force of consciousness. It is a being cloaked in fire; as I speak from it it speaks from me. In doing so, I am empowered in my absolute I-self, the deep self from which the soul emerges, declarative like a lion; declarative in that it is eternally resolved.

The essence of creation is beyond the artifices of ‘the arts’; into the bones of the spoken, the thought, the gestured, the sensed, the emotioned, the felt. The essence of creation emerges even from that unconscious place of unresolved movements within the self-soul; the dark of the sphere which revolves into itself and the perpetual full illuminations of the once-blackened selves, selves which remained immersed in shadow and as yet uncertain form. They are birthed and evisced in the true art of the turning; becoming themselves. The artist of the soul is the one who becomes ever-deeper presence, ever-witness, ever-gently cradling these new births from the emergent places. They emerge from the arms, the legs, the chest, the bones, the recesses of the mind, the light of the spirit, the mouth cavity, the wind, the rain, the waters. The artist carves them away with patient hand; tender hand, bringing their angel to flesh and light. It is not a matter of medium but of a matter of making the self; of sculpting the shadows of the soul with attunement and without judgement; with perpetual willingness to learn from that which perpetually emerges. To not remain as but as many. These are the works of man – his many precious moments which are revelries in the sun of his realization to them; this orientation of intimacy, this measure of the horizon as his sun dips below his vision into night; cooled in the deeps; risen again as a glowing, quiet moon which calls him into himself.

It is in this sense that the artist is the one who is immersed entirely in creation. It is that the very process of creation is primary; it is that which mutually participates in man’s construction of himself – that which comes and goes from his viewing. It is the language from which his alphabets emerge, the maths from which his measurements emerge; the cosmos from which his tales of creation are told. In that

it is process, it reveals man to and from himself without the certainty that man assures himself with – without this manmade security and yet with the leonic ferocity and truth of the fiery passions of life all sprung from it at once. From this place there is all feeling, all emotion, all response to life and the process of living through creation. The artist grips the glowing core; holds himself truly and clearly in the light – he strides through the projected war of his emotions and his sensations and comes into himself. He has gone deeper and deeper into himself and become himself fully – gone with the world-spectre and its callings. Gone with them! It is the finding of the song of the soul in the peeling back of the dissonances which are confusion and fluctuation, uncertainty and despair in the face of the task that each man has set before him. It is but to reach out and touch and become. Man must discard his fears and reach out and touch himself truly and become himself entirely. He must do so in the face of the entire world as the imagined thing which sows itself ‘against’ man; his projection of himself, his imaged ‘reality’ – which is nothing but a compound of incompletions. In that man becomes his soul, he is eternally resolved. He becomes charged with this resolve and wades through despair, charges through confusion; out onto the other side of himself and the transparent waters which show him the bottom of his own ocean which is not a reflection, but a glowing core. In doing so, he moves from imaginings into his divinity; his ultimate reality; his truth of himself to himself which shatters relation forever into a unity which resides beneath his projections of himself and world.

ON THE ARTIFICIALITY OF MODERN CULTURE

There is something that I think needs to be addressed, particularly regarding the artificiality of modern culture. This artificiality being – a mediation of life which leaves one absolutely alienated from that which is lived; the possibility of living together. This is a life devoid of the soul, which is to say that it is not even a life; it is a ‘life’ lived in the shallows, on surfaces, in images; registered as that which is but air and the tantalizing possibility of touch – a possibility which never arrives.

This artificiality is of a culture which promises satisfaction, which is to say a rising up into oneself in full inhabitance – a satisfaction which is promised but by way of the tools which mediate it made near impossible. The barriers then are the access points which are posited as gateways into life – social orders, technologies, working quotas, rituals, routines, and schoolings which are compounded into that which we then call ‘modern life’. Here, these rituals and rites – which are ‘everyday life’ are mere surfaces; one trudges through them out of a sense of duty, obligation, and necessity – not out of a cognizant journey through oneself and the innermost dictates of oneself which are the genius of the individual, the soul.

Then, what is to be done but to be satisfied with the scrapings, the mere wood chips and shattered glass pieces which emerge from the savage mechanism of civilization – of the machine so finely attuned to that purpose which it is to define and value the living into something which exists as in an order of operations – that it has swallowed the ‘humanity’ entirely and replaced it with a ghost of itself, a reflection, a mirror which provides the image of that which is possible (which is to say an interconnected society of human beings connected to their innermost soul paths and voices); this image is said to be the extent of life on earth.

The death of the soul in a cultural sense is the death of the meaning of life; this death is then a conjuring of a ghoulish sphere of living-as-merely-doing, living as following the order(s); living as half man. For the other half of man, his shadow self, his submerged self, the self which is in the deeps and waters of himself which holds his true voice and the key to his creativity and freedom as being of himself – is convicted of nonexistence. This death of the soul is only a death of the soul in the sense that we are convinced that there is no life but in and as materiality.

Here, in the total artificiality of modern culture, we are at the end of civilization in that the possible meaning of life is voided in the perpetual pursuit of it through the outward social mechanisms which promise pleasure and fulfillment forever. Here, religion, drugs; orders of the sense world which appeal to the nonsense but only within the realm of and under the dictates of the sensual. This perpetually deferred promise is then a state of promising; in this very state-of-promising, the possibility of being is, in turn, writ over by the thing which promises it – the final dollar, the final orgasm, the final victory; the final border. This very possibility of being is nothing more or less than that which lies, barely veiled, within each individual – one’s own soul dictates.

The voice of the soul is writ over by the modern affairs which constitute culture – which is to say a ceaseless influx of information, sensations, and noise which attune the individual to a state of being overrun; a state of being sensually invaded and taken over by stimulation. This attunement creates the environment of this happening as being ‘normal’; as such, the physiology acclimates itself and adapts to this modern condition (as it must to survive), but not without consequence. The ceaseless rush of information into and through the body strains at the processing mechanisms of the flesh and the mind; holding them at full attention and alert to the endless rush of the new modern moment – with new demands, new technologies, and new crises. As such, the individual is held at a transfixion; out

before himself – without himself – in the face of a ceaseless, oncoming catastrophe which demands his action. And yet he sits, paralyzed, unable to reach within himself; before himself in that he inhabits his sense body and nowhere else.

This is no crisis of one man; it is in this way that the experience of this happening now as a global, technologically connected network of beings is a crisis of consciousness which has captivated all relations and relationships – from man to nature and man to fellow man. It is a crisis of intimacy, a crisis of love, a crisis of environment; a crisis of self. For there is a shattering in being overrun – a shattering which is a loss of self which is a loss of the soul’s voice; in this shattering, madness.

It is this very modern culture which has acculturated and taught all men of this time – a culture which has raised them into values, beliefs, reactions, methods of reading, seeing, perceiving, apprehending, and thinking through life. It has sculpted their minds, bodies, and carved paths through them which are the paths they take in their daily lives. It is internet access, cell phone use, increasingly digital money, gas powered vehicles, movies, television shows, and so forth. That which all of these technologies share is the aspect of mediation, or being between, or being in transit to and from. These mediations, by nature, are economic transactions; they exist on the plane of being between one thing and another; the process of the human mind and body is met by a coldness; a metallic touch which is the computer screen and keyboard, the screen of the cell phone, the dashboard of the vehicle, the plastic of the card; perhaps most importantly, the projection of the image. Less and less, there is the touch of a hand, the caress of an animal, the feeling of a plant, the sun’s light, the moon; the experience of being immersed in the habitat which is the planet earth.

The virtual mediation of life is a natural extension of the creation of money and representative government – a paper trail of ‘human’ happenings which have created mediated environments to and through which human societies and

civilizations are founded – even to the invention of languages, alphabets, cave paintings, gods and goddesses, creation myths; the originating separation between man and the divine, the cosmos and the earth. These separations themselves spring from themselves as the very creation of man from himself – the way he has created the image of himself and/as/in the world. For we must see that modern culture did not spring up of its own accord, but rather that it is a creation of all human history in this particular moment of human history – as a compendium of consequences meeting in the opening of this moment.

For the modern man, just like ancient men at the fold of their social orders (as these orders do not last but as memories and flashes, active within but not as the current order) – there seems to be nowhere to turn. The very intimate relationships that serve as the lifeblood of living in the world, amongst others, exist and serve as transactions; demands and needs to be fulfilled and lost, too, to the larger social and civil condition of alienation – where the soul is voided to the world. This desperate attempt for connection can be seen in dating applications, internet chat rooms, video gaming; even face to face interpersonal relationships – where parties quickly realize they are ill equipped to love one another; as they have not yet come into the state of love within themselves. Then, it is easy to squabble over the few pleasures life has left to offer – sex, power, money, influence, celebrity – and the gamut of other socially constructed and sensually ‘pleasurable’ instances of human ‘connection’ as contact by way of mediation of the senses and organization of bodies which leaves behind an inexorable, torturous emptiness – in that the wealth which money promises, or the orgasmic joy which sex promises – merely (if so) flashes and fades as quickly as it came.

For it is the very way of perceiving life on earth which has dictated man to himself from above; from above here meaning in a philosophical handing-down of the truth as a paradigm of man’s existence among other men. For modern men are only modern men in that they are of modernity; in

this being of modernity one is through it. This moment is a crisis in the sense that very few men today are not being through modernity, in that they live from their hearts and souls – although perhaps no less lost in the world of the living than these modern men.

For if we are living through the synthesized technologies and philosophies of being-human of other men, we are not living through our own souls’ eyes; we are lost to ourselves but in the desperate bouts of reflection we see of ourselves in other things, in other people; in the outside world – like our image reflected in a shop glass window, or a cell phone screen. In these brief moments we are convinced that there is something true of us out there (as there certainly is, as we are it); yet, our true form evades us but in glimpses of purchased things and distant affairs which drift away as surely as they arrived at our respective doorsteps. For even our ability to relate to ourselves (no less, our ‘loved’ ones) is impaired by this cultural condition which we have taken on as our living-being in the world – a cultural condition which prizes consumption, accumulation, status, power, and superiority over intimacy, sharing, understanding, listening; growing together. This cultural movement is itself a philosophy; a way of perceiving and ultimately apprehending and using the world; others to achieve these means – means which end as Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The only immortality and eternity available to man is his connection to his soul; which is too his connection to the world soul; the soul in each man and being, as well as to the spirit which holds them, cradled, in the valley of life. This is the true wealth and abundance available to man; the given intimacy of himself which affords him the ability to love and truly love – from the house of love which is the glowing core of his own breast – the life that is at once his and always. This, the deepest gift of ourselves as given in our incarnation into this world of often deceptive appearances – this is what is lost to modern culture; this is the shadow which haunts modern man. It is not the death of god, it is the death of his own soul as he is lost to it as being immersed in a world of things, so completely without his truest knowledge. It is this deeper knowing of the soul to itself which is the wisdom in the fold of man; this knowing which is an understanding; an alignment of his great soul beneath the spirit; a being a root of the world soul and reveling in this opening of man to himself.

For what mechanisms are there in the modern culture which avail man to his truest self in this fashion? Is it the industrial education which produces industrial workers – trained to memorize and regurgitate information and best practices? Or is it the national community which reduces man to a number and a name and a series of licenses, certificates, and forms? Or is it the economy of trade which takes his time and energy and spirited body and leaves him with nothing but the bare means to survive – if that? Perhaps it is the great and bold technologies and sciences man has produced in his mad race to progress and civilizational advancement – technologies which tell him everything about the ‘things’ and world around him – but little to nothing of the deepest treasures that lie within him. What is this world education then but a shallowness? What kind of education could this be called that would deny man the genius within his breast?

It could be called, then, a failed civilization, a failed culture; an inadequate myth which has been taken (both comedically and tragically) far too literally. This is what modernity represents – the failed history of mankind by way of many conquerings, many enslavements, many genocides; many regimes of power crumbled to all but forgotten and misremembered dust. I could say we must not go this way, but who will hear me? Who will hear these words ring out, now, in this solitude, while the mad world goes on raging in its death throes that grow ever louder – threatening to burst the eardrums and pierce the eyes? I do not write for anything other than a warning which must be pronounced; a saying which I must say for I have no one to say it to but the page. And is not this modernity!? When the utmost feelings and sensations must be articulated, there is nowhere to turn. There is not a friend that would tolerate it (strong enough to share the load), a school that would condone it, or a civil society that would hear it.

For that which we have lost is Sophia and Athene – for that which we have lost is the whispering and the deep wisdom which is the heart and soul path – for we have been following the roads to Rome; the factory pathways, the border procedures; the identification papers, the slaughterhouse rules. The turning inward is lost to us; in this loss we have lost ourselves and we have lost one another – and this dooms us only to a world of possessions and being possessed; a world of uncertainties, confusions, and perpetual changes – as this is how things are in the world of the living. All is uprooted but the soul – the soul which has been passed down through all living things like an oral history – a story breathed into each ear and mouth and brought this body to life for its own secret methods. If we do not go to it and find it there within us; within our own labyrinths and playhouses, what have we done? We have not lived! We have sat in the shallows of life and called it living – we have made our money, drank our wine; played amongst the world of things for some time. This, perhaps, is what too, lies in the murky deeps of modern living – the fear of death revealed to be the fear of not having truly known

oneself to be that which we are – our soul’s journey. For we walk in this world somewhat torn, between this path of the heart and soul and the entirety of modern culture and society and its conveniences and mythologies of living which suggest to us otherwise; which suggest to us that salvation is found in the grasping about in the dusk of this order for the candle which will light our way into the new paradigm of mankind? Has man not looked outwardly for millenia; enslaved himself and his animal companions; enslaved the earth and despoiled her of herself in order to feed the fires of his evergrowing lust to feed? There is no end to this kind of madness; it is a madness which encourages itself by that which it creates and receives in kind – the power and permission to plunge the dagger further and further into its own chest. For modern man and his culture today is a suicide by distance; a suicide by the fatal mistake which convinces him of his separation from all things seen and unseen – his separation from the dead; his separation from the living core of the earth; alas, the distance between his own daily living and the mysteries of his own bidden soul.

There is no where left for man to go. He has burned his way to the far reaches of the earth and back; he sits now while his mother roars loudly in retaliation; shakes him, scalds him, bites him, bleeds him, starves him, and washes him away. For man cannot retreat from this earth like he cannot retreat from his own skin – but he can go within; he can jump and plunge himself into the cool waters of himself and bask in that cove where the water runs and tells him of his true nature; the cove that raises him back up to the earth and says, ‘you must go tell it on the mountain!’ And so we must proclaim these bidden dictates of the soul as such; we must see that what the modern culture offers us is but a gift thousands of years in disguise – the gift of having nowhere else to go but inside.

There is no more drunkenness In this breath that kisses the night like a stranger That rushed up to the overlook, from the alcove Hurried.

O, STORMS OF FEELING.

This first movement has progressed and completed – a movement of specific beliefs, urges, truths, and possibilities. I have surpassed it – of sheer necessity and the unveiling which is the coming apart of the curtain to reveal myself – the mask played part by a fool; a fool of infinite masks. All of the scars of this mask, all of its wounds and miserable nights are scars of a fidelity; scars of an allegiance to character. For I have played it so well – for I have played it for ten years and endless acts and become it so completely; all ended in a collapsed marionette which was his body.

Which direction remains? At this derilect crossroads which is also an escalator to absolute consciousness. This ten years has carved me away from myself so definitively that I have become another sculpture to myself – a living, moving David complete with new impossibilities and the infinite distances which compose them. This progression, too, has come with new terrain, with scientific choices, over which I have mistakenly agonized and called accounts.

For I am no different being – but changed form so unrecognizably to myself. To pull faces in the mirror is now to dance a stranger. To move into love now is a physic within which I, myself, am the volatile variable. How to create this true force now, within and as myself entirely? I have called it in so many ways and yet find the doors to the infinite sealed yet again shut – the Janus doors carved hard and wide which are the gates to a beautiful new war. The call to ecstasies is overpowering; it lingers like a perfume

stench and stains my lips, my poetry, too, different colors, calls out with longing. I call against the gates of the law with my hands; the gates of the law which are forever my own…

To summon a deeper, greater love – a catalyst which might rip my flesh into higher being – a chisel, a hammer, a beating which produces pigmented sparks. How deep and how low must I call? To pound my chest and run until my lungs grow an answer from within them; a new organ; the true poetic growth from which final meaning is summinged – these perfect chords. For where else might I travel? For where the world whispers, inward, and I am drawn and dragged to the sharp knife, the swinging knife, the knife of time that has told all tales. I yield to this alone! And yet I do not yield, I lament and sketch a surrender to the hearse but I do not die – I play dead, I play lame – until I am dragged to death in his high chair and satins. Death, my true judge, I trick him – I must! His shrouded face; the agonies of being in his shadow – my true being, I am him! The dancing god and the plowing blood upon which I sail, onward – weightless, buoyant, feigned – with coins upon my eyes.

For how much of these one act plays hold water? How much of these soliloquys of desperation – when spilled, retain a mark of the golden ore of the soul? Could there not be a weight and measure for this – my existence? And there are these documents, and there are these limbs – certainties – wrought in the shop window of the giant butcher – the eater of all great truths of men – the one who topples his cities and proves his love expressed violently from the chest; the flesh.

He too will tell my love – in these sealed volumes which lie like silent tombs, in a catacomb, in a sewer, discarded underground in a dead city – the shadows which is the world of my contemporaries – of fellow men with this unbreachable separation – for I am not being like them. I am like an abscess on god; a new limb on Krishna’s skin; time has told me nothing but shadow directions, a sundial, and a name on which I once called love, an illusion dug up

from the trench of the mind; animated by the thrust of feeling. And as the feeling of ten years subsides, it is all of that which will not return. For I cannot call back phantoms and dead things which were all dead – their beckoning silhouettes proved stone. I cannot call back that which has been silent forever but become the sparked spirit. This is how the lies I have known came to acquire their names.

The truths that I have found are in my fellow man alone. The possibility is only in relationship and it comes down.

II.

The effort of consciously doing is titanic; cannot be overstated – the sheer necessity of attuned awareness, which is to say – to be living – is matched only by the one who will attend entirely; the one who is sentinel to himself and observant of each outpouring of genius – the genius that is the flowing of time in the face of the eternal. For the body itself is the vehicle of time reflecting itself; upon it like a great writhing snake upon a mirror – which, at each twist and turn, is forced more fully upon and into itself – dipping into the hot, wet pools of life force energy which are its immortal resurrection.

One rides the body in this sense; one is infinite unto it – pulsing and dipping into its gargantuan truths – the mating which is the interpenetration of the body and soul until the body exhausts, steaming, and winks out of passage like a cold star. Until the body is done, there is this hot soul lament – this drag birdsong which traces constellation murmurs across the blue black. It sings itself into meaning. Here, one begs travel with the body, travel with mad strokes of genius which tell the soul to itself by way of the medium of the body.

Can the lament change? The lament, once a dirge, now a great and heightened orchestration of one and the same – comedy and tragedy – only by way of conscious awareness.

For I have called it and called it again and measured the siren chorus and how it sparkles against the infinite. Like the director who has pitted the dialogue into the stage and its figurative props: this is how I have come to know how to tell time – deceiver, and yet the soliloquy of misunderstandings which proves the deepest knowledge – through beat rhythms so close to the heart that they lose themselves in their true counting – a counting which tells in speech beyond number and name. It is the speech which is closest to the heard. It is to each man to find his secret language and spell himself into existence – to spell him his own private exactitudes, chiseled languages which prove new methods to his fellow man – methods evercloser to the ore of the heart and soul; his furthest reaches as divined truths come down into the hands of the poet like a moth or glowing firelight.

For the poet has called the infinite by its true name. The poet has called in communion with the stars and they are his brothers. He is twin to the constellations, Arcturus and Sirius; he is twin to Saturn’s loud movement. How intimately can man know the sacred limits as they pound the hot iron of his soul? As they bring the mallet to his flesh like a blacksmith? Indeed, the truths of man are the truths of these prayer circles of the stars which dance his begging, which dance him to kingship and ruined empire in kind. These are the secret truths which outgrow man in their mass and cast him, mere shrub or fleeting green which is caught by the net of the seasons and become his age – for man cannot help but become his age – to become a part of this movement of revelry, of the Dionysian call which is the call of all mankind to itself, now, to the sacred dance which is the outpouring of his erotic energy. For who can resist this dance? Each man is man. The philosopher, the prostitute, the director – all holding the Herculean position – the half flesh and half spiritude; the being called to the stars and firmly earthed.

So each man today should become a poet in his own language. In his unique configuration he was born to

receive whispers; these to him are the sacred, ineffable truths which constitute life. They must be spoken! By each man in his own order and time – this is what it is to be living; to be in search of meaning like a hound in a forest of blue trees; the moon grove of the night through which man is truly living – feeling, seeing, breathing – in this veil of world which to him is the everyday versing of things, the composing of realities which he does without eyes, the blind, sightless composing without ears which is his unheard telling. It is the telling he has told before himself; that very telling which composes the essence of his belief. To hear our song as it is being sung is to open our sensorium entirely, the whole levitated world of the deep senses, the senses that are at once receptive and primed to act in accord with the meeting place of man and his missive from Athena – her juncture of the spirit and the body through which the word becomes received wisdom. Each man’s ear is constructed to construct his true name as the body as pounding utterance: as man is cast into hard and clear stone – like diamond or amber which holds the soul aloft, steady and unwavering.

There must be ordered chaos in the heart of the poetic man – the ability to receive all feeling truly and open, the very openness which could cast him out of existence into abyss. Man must be this daring with his lot, this prepared to come to the table with his soul and pit his lot with the ends of the world possibility. For he goes daring, unseen, into the infinite unknowns – beyond the gallows of the materiality of his time into that which is real beyond life or death, beyond terror or ecstasy, beyond light and dark, self and world, man and woman. Man is shattered by his very call which understands him, unseats him, which lifts him in the low which shifts the sands and earth beneath his feet in its being with him – a togetherness – and forever changes his world. For when man has opened the doors to himself beyond language to create himself directly, truly, his call resounds and changes the time of what is possible. This is the gift of the poetto his fellow man – the highest gify which is an outpouring of his soul, an outpouring which expands the limits and is a voice of encouragment, an urging of his

fellow man forever toward himself again; forever toward the freedom of his own true language, his own true speech.

For each man holds his truest nature within, steadily called forward in his willing voice by his walking, his pacing heard as it moves by the blood through the labyrinth of his birthing, the labyrinth which holds his insides, rising from their slumber, shaking dormancy; the body which is not all composed of matter.

The further and deeper that man accesses the recesses of his soul, he moves beyond the horizontal realm of his desert walking and into the vertical order of spirit and soul which at once plunges him into the spectral world of his deepest desires and fears; upward and outward toward the firmament of the ancients. He goes here in his own time; sometimes he goes here along, without a Virgil, without god, without lovers, guides; he passes through the gates of hell without a final sense of togetherness, without the forever which is at one the unity of two opposites; this is why he goes there – he risks himself and goes beneath to retrieve that other himself as the opposite; himself as the shadow form which holds his truest meaning, shifting, evasive, the dark that his day rejects and yet is magnetized; his day and night are overturned and he solders his absent parts to himself like a cloak of shadow feelings, a clock of the moon which holds him aloft, shapeshifting in the ceaseless night of space which garners his present flesh and counts and orders it as time. The man himself embodies his Saturnalia, his darkest eye which is also his outer limit, his cloak of stars in which he is wrapped in the night; he observes his clothes, committed to revelry and the movements that swell in his chest as his humanity; movements which carry him from the rim of the ancients into the bowl of modern times. Man is in his own holler, his own valley; if man has been born, he has been born a thousand times over – a wretch, a prophet, a seamstress, a descendant of David and Solomon – all from this divinity – all from this sacred lineage of the self cast in star compositions.

How large could be this family? How descended from the tree of all being; when he comes from that place as his inner sight he comes from his truest self. He reaches into the depths of his roots which is all suffering, all great religious and spiritual joy and fervor – and he becomes Dionysus – he becomes all revelry and contradiction of history in the intimate consciousness which solders the poles together – the call of light and shadow, spirit and form, man and woman – east and west, north and south.

So call! Call from that place of solitudes and call into the reach of being – and so that call might be existence; so that call might be the whisper of infinity brought into man’s own time, what remains of itself: the call is equal parts revelry and order.

The coming together is the divine spectacle, the orgy of happening which births infinite children who come to love as love itself and breathe the new time which becomes us. These children tell us evermore of themselves, that which we are, cast in words and the flesh of this moment which becomes that totem of man – his statues of memory which fall last at the end of all that he has wrought; the final breath and dusk of breathing. All of man’s civilizations and mechanisms breathe through him and are done in this fashion; breathe and are told of their old age by the breath that leaves them and, at last, take passage beneath the horizon. He comes and goes in a cosmic volatility like the sun and the moon – together – Adam Kadmon, the breath of man – together – his electric bodies sparked and extinguished as a wire line through the infinite; a current upon which mankind is stretched like clothes on a clothesline.

He goes again and again, there like a thief, he goes again and again there in a stealing of his life from the wide temple doors of the heart, his heart – an engine which splits hot coal and burns his very incarnate form evermore to ash. Today, man must die and die again unto himself – infinite deaths which structure and break the borders of his self

work – the limits of his creative world. He is the mad sculptor who breaks even his absolute core open to reveal new light – a new light which swallows him whole.

Today I spin my wings; cast them dyed from chrome, the impossible chrome of my heart – no, not that chrome of old, the old references – but that unstained steel of my heart! The blade that has cut and cut again but receives itself into its sheath unscratched and unscarred; the blade that has seen the wear of this body and yet emerges gleaming into the sun; the light and shining blade of Michael. Today I call Michael and Chamuel and Thoth – today I call the angels and the scribes to come down and do this work with me – this trudging through the marsh of my life and the looking up to find meaning on the streets, the shattered glass and the beautiful distances. For if I have walked miles today I return and collapse upon my bed like I am grieving, unseen fatigues; these visions that come no more, proved delusions – the phantasm of the youth who walked among the groves and felt the hot pulsing of the body is gone! The hot pulsing remains but what am I to do with this life? I do not sit paralysis, no, not today. My love, my angels, my light body rises to meet this page, these words drummed out with syllabic care; I submit these frequencies to the page with scientific precision. Today, the writing is a physics; as it always has been with me. Today, I speak and speak as assemblies.

When there is no where else to go, I beat my chest in percussions and emerge this music; when I have walked and I am weary; when I have gone and can go no more to the limits of these limbs – this is when I write. I write to understand and I accept the good and bad writing, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible; the writing is wholeness and thus entirely allowed and flows entirely from the dank corridors which are the ancient submerged in the body, rising forth and lapping up against the shore like a mad ocean – sometimes uncured like from a tempest; otherwise and often whispering and tiding with a barely perceptible lowing. Today, I am met with these limits – these limits which come as the normalcy of morning, the regularity of these acts like pouring out coffee and rising from the bed to meet sunlight and again into these dirges and questionings – the meaning does not remain! Even after

each creation theres is nothing but the expressed body. The mode of creation begs its own continuation as that which is truly itself; it sheds its skin perpetually like a snake – leaving trails mistaken for truth. Today, the truth is in the act; the truth is in the act forever; even as I am exhausted physically, I come into light. For I am living; the writing is a way into life with the heightened extremity and feeling of the Greek tragedy, that fine writing which elevates the everyday life to the level of that which deserves and in deserving is, constantly examined at all levels of the miniscule and the macrocosmic; here lie the gods. For when we consider our lives and our beliefs, we are taking into account the entirety of that which we believe to have compiled by way of experience as knowledge and truths of being. In this perpetual re-evaluation, we catch ourselves creating blocks to the trumpeting instrument of the body which receives the new sound of Athena as she calls us into this moment. When we receive the new sound, the entirety of our lives alight as poetic and dramatic as emergent from ourselves to tell us something secred of ourselves. For this is what it means to let the words come without judgement. The words themselves turn into vibratory signatures which express something entirely new.

For I wish to live every day ensconsced in divine and alight meaning, meaning on fire; thus it is so because I have made it so with language. I incorporate and excorporate gestures, vocalizations, eye movements, listenings, into this sculpture of man who – by way of these momentous realizations – creates a poetic landscape of life perpetually. In this way it is as I am living with Holderlin and Aeschylus in the grand lineage of making life through poetry into the beyonds of poetry which encompass the whole of life – into a revolution of everyday life which makes the divine living – the ecstasies! – possible in perpetuity by way of the action of one living being, one who is living and living with the full fire of the heart and soul in union! It is always and forever up to one man to do this work. It cannot be summoned but by the individual genius which lies deep and dormant within the chest of the soul – within each individual and yet

deceptively obscured by that which it produces and sheds in each and every moment – the work that is ‘the world’. The composition itself.

For all things are a part of that divine music which is the ceaseless flow from the mouth of the great beast of being catalogued and shorn forever in the tides of time – the rising and falling of empires, the shedding of skins, the burning of pastures and the rising fires of the forest. It is in the acceptance of all of this music, including the monumental cacophonies which shatter the ears of man in which the beauty of life is truly comprehended. It is the truth of the dischords which shatters the bounds between man and his world; the shattering which envelops him in the indistinguishability to and from which his life submerges and recedes and bursts with the terrible configuration of a letter, a symbol, a face stretched about the womb to make an impression through the rubber bellied stomach of that which holds him, the womb of Krishna from which out spills this life that we see manifest, expressed, existent. For the beats and steady drum of the heart are moved and stayed and composed by man; we rarely see within ourselves and others this self conscious composition and configuration of the flesh, nonetheless that which emerges from it. We do not reign in or control the flesh, we move with it in the understanding that it is the instrument which articulates and gives the horizontal (the material, the physical) to the spirit and the soul; it is there that they meet in communion to articulate that which they have heard from the depths and the ceiling of the stars. To compose man is thus: to make him instrument and raise the left hand to the stars and the right to the graven depths and through his chest unite the cross of spirit and matter and make him – make him channeled and in light of the gods as they pass through him as whispers. He follows the trail of the gods; as they lay the trail for him in whispers man becomes hunter of himself, the hunter enveloped in the play of the hunt – the hunt of which he is the hilarious and golden prize.

The framework for the Greek tragedy (here, we could also say, simply – tragedy in the highest form) – is of the elevation of the depths of the human psyche to the forefront of the psyche – which is to say, the presentation of the deepest human problems as experienced subconsciously; subliminally – to and through the surface of the conscious mind as performed, acted out, and expressed. With the thinker Carl Jung, ‘Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. Anyone who can admit this will first seek the solution in himself, and this in fact is the way all the great solutions begin’. Then, the theatre of tragedy and comedy is a stage upon which these inner selves can be enacted, expressed, pitted up against their synthetic opposites (their antiscions, daemons, others, and so forth) – and be resolved in a violent conflict, a weeping embrace, a horrible mistake; a grand realization by way of soliloquy. The expression of words and actions is then perpetually the inner self coming into resolution by way of the act. It is, then, a question of whether or not we realize this process, itself, as that which makes us, our lives manifest; our deepest wishes, desires, and selves.

So then, for Achilles’ demise, Chiron’s sacrifice, Prometheus’ freedom; Oedipus’ realization, Icarus’ fall – there is the drama of each man’s desire, each man’s love for another, each man’s self disgust; each man’s reaching for the divine; each man’s realization of himself by way of his actions – actions which, more often than not, lead him by the leash of his innermost passions – that which we might call ‘fate’ in engagement with ‘free will’, man’s perceived conscious bidding to himself. By way of these tragedies and myths we come to understand ourselves; our conflictual existences with a clarity that may only come in the observation of the unfolding – an observation in which, in the Greek tradition, one is enraptured in and partakes in as absolutely as going-beyond-acting – into the ecstasy of the happening becoming real by way of mutual participation.

This is then what conjures and has conjured the entirety of world history – the creation of terrible dramas and tragedies

and moments of enlightenment soldered by the mutual thought, action, and belief of individuals. As is inherent in this thesis, the very ‘nature’ of the world itself is nothing more than a perpetually created and re-created form which, too, one might call the self which incorporates all things – including the entirety of mankind. Here, lies the storehouse of the entirety of man’s wishes, dreams, agonies, and desires: made manifest in each moment in and as ‘the world’ synthesis – as mosaic.

What the masterful tragedy accomplishes is the channeling of the synthetic energy which is the subconscious basin of all mankind; the blood which runs through all things and charges them energetically; particularly how the blood runs through man today – where it meets its stifling and damming in fear, confusion, mistaking; pride, greed, courage – the forces which we might call gods in that they bring man (and all of mankind) to a heightened state when they manifest individually and collectively – all heightened states which must fall as they rise, and rise as they fall. For even after each emotional tempest, man must return to his equilibrium, his beating heart; where he sleeps and exists. What tragedy and comedy and the emotional enaction may accomplish is to bring man to acknowledgement and awareness of that which is occurrring within him and his fellow man – without bringing him to blows with his fellow man, or to the end of his life. For many years, this was the way the inner conflict was thought and fought – as war, enslavement, cruelty; struggle for dominion over neighboring tribes and in man’s fight to subdue his nature and survive – the very earth he stands upon. It was made manifest as outer event, happening; in the political sense as being with violent consequence. We must, today, recall a theatre which – in mastery – rises man’s inner paradoxes to the surface and gives them resolution in the act which is not an action; yet, makes itself known.

For it does take one who has gone through these passages within himself, within his mind, heart, soul and passed through his body – to write these musics. For the music is

itself beneath the language-concept into the intricacies of the sounds that are made that are like keys to readjust the locks of man’s psyche – covered in history and the very conceptions which submerge the true face of man as spirit and soul beneath the masks which are meted out to him by his society of man; the masks he believes he must fashion to meet his fellow men. For how can one tell of a way through the labyrinth without passing through it himself? It is in this way that Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes stand not only as major figures of that which we today call ‘art’ – but as figures of great early psychological works which are and were a gift and service to Greek society as major transformative powers and forces – forces which still today shift man into new existences – freed from the shadow chains of his conceptions of himself and the binds which he fashions and enforces within himself and out in the world among other men. It is this force of psychic transformation by way of enaction of the inner conflict that flushes man of the voice which is not his; emboldens him in his connection to the divine as a clear channeling of that which belongs to him – his sacred and heavenly lot as his life which he is given to live; truly live.

This has been called, historically, initiation – initiation into the way of life; the walking down beneath the surface of appearances and that which has been called to exist by man and his exegesis over time – the walking down to and through that which is the primordial mud, the frozen lake – that which is man’s very humanity: his psyche which stretches over aeons – a psyche which is equal parts his own and the mind of the earth and stars. It is the place in which the only lack is a lack of separation; the place of total synthesis where man loses himself to and as that which he is: a delusion, a passing candle, an energetic force which is kindled in equal parts by the stoking fire of the flesh and the spark of the spirit and the lowing of the soul. All that he is calls to him; man is caught on the cross. And it is in this way that only in his death is man reborn as himself – passed through the veil of illusion into absolute embodiment: the embodiment which is his electric line between Athene and

his daemon – the vertical circles of his existence which animate him with the power of becoming deeply human: beyond and through the flesh.

Today, there is the mistaking of culture and art. Today, there is a need, just as ever, for the master-craft which is the soul journey manifest on the stage, in the sound, in the text – the master-craft which accounts in each brush stroke, whisper, and figure the entirety of man’s being – striking against the sky of his world today: his world which shows him again and again where his soul stands cut against the blue sky of man’s compendium of actions which has created the world in, through, and upon which he walks. For this is how he is alienated from himself: that he cannot be incorporated into that which exists; that he stands apart, finds himself cornered by the conditions which continue to create and re-create themselves by way of the immense and perpetually underestimated power of the belief of many. The world is a machine of men; a machine of his minds, his bodies, his souls – all put to cause and churned in the mix of that which tells him of his life by that which he has created to tell the tale. There is no accounting today for democracy, nor is there accounting for the theatre – terms and spheres which persist even today lost to the heart and soul of the Greek tradition which assembled them as mechanisms and methods to bring man into the space of his heart and soul. Today, they are merely organizing forces to provide entertainment and enforce the façade of outer social stability, even as the heart and soul of man corrode and fade, lost and unexercised like hidden muscles, amidst a time which does not and cannot provide him the supernatural bread which he craves with all that he is: the bread that affirms his wholeness, his purpose, his soul. Man today is educated to play his part in the machine of the empires which precede him; he is initiated into nothing of the magics of the self and soul and the inner gifts that each man has been bestowed as his incarnate compass – the configuration of the stars upon his being spit out into the world of the flesh which serve as his angels – who watch over him and may yet tell him things that will change his

life. This orientation is what education requires, just as the theatre requires it in order to create an atmosphere of boundless, transformative potential in the voice and ear of man.

                          88


MANKIND: THE THEATRE OF THE WORLD

The point of course being that once the play begins the actors are so completely immersed in their roles that they forget that they themselves wrote the play, constructed the sets, or are even acting.

So man’s language is assembled: a series of sonic connections which produce an energetic signature which interact physiologically with the body as resonances; vibrations, senses, and tenses. So man’s world is assembled: a series of energetic systems which channel, avert, divert, convert, and connect man’s expressions and impressions – like aqueducts of currency. So man’s self-concept is assembled: convicted of himself by way of that which he has created as endless mirror to affirm that which he believes he is. And thus, it is so. This – the magic of man’s self creation as a history: the history of making the very genre of mankind by way of his construction: stone by stone, thought by thought, pace by pace, fire by fire – is what is lost to the modern conception of history and time as passage.

Today, man takes everything about his existence (the physical manifestation) for granted: being that he confuses that which ‘is’ (that which he observes with ‘proof’ phenomenally) with that which is – the process of creation to and through which he ceaselessly makes and remakes himself and his world as reflections of one another – the absolute poles of his existence; the paradox of himself conducted in relation: to and through which energy flows.

Man is the actor and the world is his stage; his play is of the unmasking of the director – himself. His play is of the setting fire to the stage, to the chaos of the orchestra being broken open and shattered by an explosion which rips open the pit and exposes the playhouse to the stars; his play is of the actor remembering that he is acting, only to walk off the stage forever. This is a play of remembering man’s true nature; that the play itself is the spell or method through which man walks on the journey of his life through to himself; the perpetual loss and tragedy which strips him to

his core and from there he laughs – realizing that that which he lost is merely what he was not: his body, his dreams, his illusions, his visions, his self-concept broken open by the passage of time to reveal him to himself – naked, before a shattered mirror – cast off the cloak of his body and his mind – all revealed as garments with useful traits in their place and time.

Rilke Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

RILKE’S ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

Rilke is, by matter of course, a poet of the spiritual quest – or the turning inward where the glimmer burst like a star is come; the lantern of the soul (the lamp) itself catching the electric light of the spirit and giving massive perspective: as the poet says, ‘for here there is no place that does not see you’. The torso of Apollo is acephalic; Rilke finds the Apollinian not in the head, nor the limbs where the blood flows to the reaches of the flesh – but in the soul’s light which is mounted upon the axis of the flesh; the vortex point like depicted in Masson’s sketches. In this, Rilke’s poem, there is not so much an art as a concern with an accurate depiction of the Apollinian so much to lead to Rilke’s statement which jars the poem from itself: ‘You must change your life.’

Here, the work of the philosophical does the work of the poem with Rilke – which is to say create together an exposition of the wisdom which lies all too still living within the breast of Apollo which shines out, ‘suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp’. Rilke, in his later poems is like someone attempting to communicate a secret(e) by way of language as a transmissive devise – something from and through which he is unscrewed. The poet has become something more like one who has heard something and uses the medium of poem through which to pass the message like a communique from the front lines of an invisible war.

It is so much that the poem here is an x-ray of circumstance; that Rilke’s observation here does not merely observe (perhaps in his training with Rodin) the seductive elements of the flesh but to trace the light emergent from within them to its source, a radiating core in the chest like a sun – juxtaposed with the ‘dark center’ of the groin where there is another star, more like a vacuum or a void through which ‘procreation’ emerges. The analysis of Apollo as he stands (although ‘we cannot know his legendary head’, or what runs through it) is like for Rilke the opportunity to give flesh

or provide an inroad to the sketching of the cosmic man – the Adam Kadmon of the Greek tradition; the autopsy (almost akin to his Washing the Corpse poem) of that which is dead and yet still commands the living with the thrust of his embodied history: ‘And he, whose name they didn’t know, naked and clean now, gave commands’.

The Rilkean conception of history proceeds thusly – that that which is dead or dismembered or perhaps partially transfigured; known and yet utterly unknowable or unnameable (the men and myths who have lived and yet are said to live no more) command life as it stands, emerged, existent and – to the ‘we’ that is us who stand with the living Rilke at the moments of writing these poems – is yet partially obscured by our inability to ‘know’. For how can we truly know the history that has imbued our present moment with all of its contemporary thrust and the energy that runs through it like a steaming freight? We ride upon this train; the passage of history through which this present moment is merely ours as a formality – this moment that carries us unseen into a night of further night; deeper blue- black groves; shades of the moon.

For we go here with Rilke to get to the bottom of this, the nature of our times and the sacred that lies at the foundation of all times – we go here because Rilke can take us, a Virgil to his own time; because he has been there in his own right. The lamp that Rilke sees in the torso of Apollo he recognizes as his own; he grasps its handle to describe the contours of the stone flesh as if standing beside his own Virgil of the poem and the statue – the crux that Shelley stands between – even as Rilke stood with his fellow master Rodin. Here, we find Rilke in his element – in that like The Panther, it is as if he stands like a scientist in a room or a cage with the specimen; the thing to be examined; stands with the spying glass for its essence. For with Apollo, Rilke reads his examigination from the inside out – the light which catches the Apollinian in his eye is not deceived by a source which casts light down or about the form. Rilke reads this source light of the Apollinian as emergent from beneath the

flesh and seeing him. It is in this way that the roles of the poem are reversed dramatically in the final stanza of the text and Rilke realizes (that much like the unnameable and unnamed autopsied man in Washing) – that the still-living stone flesh of Apollo is that which is observing him; conducting the affairs of the waking day.

Here, we are ripe to introduce the poet Ritsos and his gesture – perhaps not even to discuss the poems of the poet (which would take substantial time and perhaps deviate us from the matter at hand) – but to discuss the poetic gesture which arranges them: that the poet would write poems then bury them in bottles away from the prison guards. What does this say about the work of poetry and about Ritsos’ connection as a poet to (at least) the later Rilke? It tells us of the nature of the horizontal in relation to the vertical; the work that the vertical can do to submerge history into myth and emerge history into the present moment. For to unearth a Ritsos poem today would be to retroactively event history; to come into a new poem which is altogether quite old by the standards of a technological modernity. To unearth a Ritsos poem today would be like to unearth a bacterium from a melting glacier; to dig up a clay pot from the ground at an archeological site to the point of which Ritsos puts his poems, willingly, to history in acknowledgement that they cannot be heard yet. And that in death (in the case of the unnamed man) or in the fragmentation of Apollo by way of the time which strikes stone from his flesh into sand, that perhaps Rilke’s subjects can be heard ever more clearly – stripped ‘naked and clean’; perhaps even altogether come to dictate the times which are in the wake.

Why would we call dead poets and dead men and dead gods dictators? Even dictators of the living? We would call them this because they inhabit the shadow of the living; that they whisper to the living the secrets of the ground and the buildings and the myths which spellbind them even today: myths of love, myths of empire, myths of self; myths of control and victory and submission which appear to be almost timeless – these very myths of value and meaning

and worth which can be seen in the Babylonian, the Vedic, the Hebrew, and so forth. It is these historical (in the sense that they form the sediment of this very earth-as-world conjecture as today) conceptions of meaning and being- human which enrapture the present; spellbind precisely through the death which has severed their heads (we cannot know his legendary head) – and yet remains their body, the flesh which still emanates light from the core which is their ever-making and shifting even as the obvious consciousness is ‘extinguished’.

Rilke’s call is to examine the dead as that which we merely believe to be dead; just as Ritsos and Cavafy and even Sappho understand the importance and power of the Greek mythological-historical condition as it enraptures the present moment and enacts spellbinding authority on the ‘living’. For the autopsied man and the stone flesh of Apollo observe and draw the strings on those who believe they are treating, treading death and history with the salve and wash of man’s actions as today; yet, they are acted upon evermore by the immortal forces which conduct the passage from the synthesized conjecture (by and at the hands of man) to and from life and death – transacted by Chiron; witnessed by the horses of Achilles in Cavafy’s poem of the same name:

When they saw Patroklos dead -- so brave and strong, so young -- the horses of Achilles began to weep; their immortal nature was upset deeply by this work of death they had to look at. They reared their heads, tossed their long manes, beat the ground with their hooves, and mourned Patroklos, seeing him lifeless, destroyed, now mere flesh only, his spirit gone, defenseless, without breath, turned back from life to the great Nothingness.

Zeus saw the tears of those immortal horses and felt sorry. "At the wedding of Peleus," he said,

"I should not have acted so thoughtlessly. Better if we hadn't given you as a gift, my unhappy horses. What business did you have down there, among pathetic human beings, the toys of fate. You are free of death, you will not get old, yet ephemeral disasters torment you. Men have caught you up in their misery." But it was for the eternal disaster of death that those two gallant horses shed their tears.

The very poem itself, together with Cavafy’s turn to the Homeric – complicates the theme of death and deathlessness even as it approaches the very undying; persistent words of Homer which work like Achilles’ horses, descendants of breath which are yet to be extinguished even as the breath stops – upheld by some transacted core of the spirit which remains within them even as man rises and falls from the ocean of his incarnations like waves. It is difficult to read Achilles’ horses as apart from Achilles himself – mourning so deeply the extinguished flesh of Patroklos and yet never given name apart from that which is in Achilles’ half-mortal possession. It is then that Achilles’ horses; their immortal lot as those who weep over the dead are of that which persists beyond the folding nature of all things (inherent in their existent thingness – even like the stone of cities) is also of Achilles’ immortal lot as the raging of his menos captured in the Homer song.

For it is this capturing of which we speak when we speak of the work of the poem – the almost indistinguishability of the poem from the stone, the statue, the sculpting of man himself which resides in the realm of the unextinguished; the immortal song of warriors and everyday life in the home. What is suggested – even in the burying of Ritsos’ poems – is that the poem persists beyond the horizontal; that in Ritsos’ digging, the poem is even more stone than stone itself in that it retains the glowing core of the Appolinian which is the light of the soul emergent from within to

express the human in relation to the infinite in song. For when we declare stone, we declare that which Michelangelo spoke: ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free’. But when we declare the poem, we say, ‘I saw the angel in the man and carved until I set him free’. It is in this way that poems emerge from the breasts of a thousand Orpheus men in times of crisis and chaos and overturnings – in short, the times that have captivated man since the first poems were spoken and writ. It is in this sense that the tradition of poetry and that once it is spoken it exists forever as from the breath is that of magic and deep creation – as it at once becomes itself by way of the human that its its instrument; transforms the human in its elucidation.

For the perspective shift at the end of Rilke’s Torso is the very perspective shift that occurs as enlightenment – or as, simply, a state of lightening from within. It is the candle of one’s own genius which lights the electric flame of the Promethean bowl – the soul which intercourses with the spirit; flesh to breath – and it is the nurturing of this intercourse which is itself the state through which man transacts with the infinite. And by this term transact, it means to conduct and go through as passage: the will of man embraced by the corridor which is all time and being. And Apollo, as described here by Rilke, is practically enlightened. He is enlightened with the light of which he himself is the source; himself being an identification and sourcing from within; a sourcing which disobeys the dualism of life and death; a sourcing which emerges as if from a vortex into and through the layers of time which coat the stone of the body which still ‘glisten[s] like a wild beast’s fur’. Rilke becomes surrounded by Apollo; commanded through him, channeled – ‘You must change your life’. Apollo becomes him and speaks through him as he becomes the one observed: much like the panther is consumed by a seeing which enters him (‘Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly --. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.’

                          96


        THE FUNCTION OF PLEASURE IN
        TECHNOLOGICAL MODERNITY

The true person is not any one in particular, but like the deep blue color of the limitless sky, it is everyone, every where in the world. – Dogen Zenji

     A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.
                          – Niels Bohr

The function of pleasure today is that it is ceaseless; that it is meant to – in this very sense – cease to become pleasure in that it is a state that is no longer without relativity. It is that pleasure is the currency which propels modern society; it is presented to the individual at each juncture as that which compels him to participate insofar as that he has not already – and that once he is in the state of participation with pleasure, he is among others; he is a citizen.

It is pleasure alone which holds up the walls to civilization; pleasure in each consumptive act – in each looking, eating, drinking, feeling – a pleasure which no longer has the mask of pain to hold up to the mirror of its own sensorium – but rather pleasure as an absolute entity which now exists in name and name alone. That which could have once been pleasure now exists as an addiction to mask the emptiness and antiscion of pleasure: suffering, displeasure, pain – bubbling beneath the surface of the individual.

Today’s pleasure is a scientific one – exercised and controlled at an executive level by way of the use of devices in and through which true entrance into modern society proper is promised. It is by through this gate: the gate of chemical dependency, participatory ignorance, willful forgetting – that one is promised, at last, the community the individual craves so terribly – a state which seems relegated to a mythic past of belonging. For this is what would constitute true pleasure at the level of the historically

individuated human being – the ability to at once be oneself entirely and be among others in such a fashion as to not have one’s individuality violated by a regulatory force.

For today, when we look to community we find the ruins of religion, tribalism, and other such forces which held the immediate world together in times without technological networks. For if the tribe is the here and now, today, the tribe is the neighborhood – not nation. It is a state of ideological interconnectivity, together with the practical state of affairs which govern the function of our everyday lives (food supply and distribution systems, local, state, and national police and governmental bodies) which today appears confounded and confounding. Without a firm sense of ‘where we are’, it is difficult to affirm ‘who ‘we’ are’.

For if there is a sense of self in the wake of the 19th and now 20th centuries, it is that the sense of self is allied to the senses; namely the gratification of them; this is to say that the sense of self today is the body-in-pleasure, or the body-in-rapture. For it is pleasure and pleasure alone which guides the masses in the slowly corroding light of the long death of god, a death which (in coincidence with the rise of pure materialisms at all sides, from Marxisms to Capitalisms) has reallocated the entire lot of the world to affairs and dealings of the flesh – without regard for the metaphysics and states of light which guide, construct, and work in the spaces between materialities. Without a metaphysical conception of self, or a trialogue between self, spirit, and soul – man has lost himself to the world affair; furthermore, has lost the wisdom of his ancestors – from Yeats to Plato and the heyoka. For here, the death of the role of the poet, the philosopher, and the shaman in society are prominent if not emblematic of this decline and loss of the spirit (the feminine aspect) in relation to the conversion of materiality (the masculine) into the entirety of that which ‘is’ as socially and politically constructed as illusion of together.

It is pleasure, the Roman pallative, which still holds sway today like the names of the planets. The phrase here horror

vacui perhaps is that which might describe the epochal rise of materialism; the compensatory loss of the soul with the gain of things, prizes, pleasures, consumptions – all of which attempt to replace the primary and simple function of the soul – the clay bowl which becomes gold in its collection of the manna of the spirit from the stars: in relation to that which is also of spirit. It is the soul which is the individual; one can only become as such by engaging the soul that is within oneself as that which one truly is – together, in unity of spirit and soul – one is Self. This godliness is, of course, also the unity of the spirit and the material, the man and the woman, the grounding of the electricity of the stars within and as the Self which is also utterly useless as it has no definition, no value, and no purpose but to be. This Self is that which is all things; this Self is that from which emerges the illusory projection of the individual as couched and moderated from within the legislative-social sphere – the self that is (synthetically) absolutely defined and possessed by material.

When this work is done, the human being is created from without; artificially imprisoned (read: all men are free forever before the realm of ideation) within structures which dictate and possess their everyday lives as categorical materialities. To say the words categorical materialities is to say: that man is drawn and quartered and utterly dissassembled by modernity into parts – limbs, organs, - which perform social functions for the civilization and enlighten the civilization – which here means that the flesh of man is chained to the civilizational mechanism; it is the flesh of man alone which animates his prison chamber: his heart and soul are that which stoke the fire of the machine which has replaced him as the world.

So now we can see the perversion of this work: that man has been turned inside out and harnessed by that which he has created to do the work of creating the ‘world’ – a world which can only reproduce itself as being fundamentally limited by a loss of spiritude. This ‘world’ can produce anything founded in the material, or the horizontal axis of

living – but it suffers a metaphysical death and decline which is also the decline of civilization in that it loses touch with the spiritude and soul which propels it. This is how a machine dies: with faintly glowing ashes which altogether dissipate and leave nothing but cold steel and dead gears. This turning of materialism as itself a history which coincides with industrial modernity is also a telling of materialism to itself – a system of (perhaps necessary) belief among men which has shown him the full face of the moon which is the enlightening of this belief (as beliefs are always abstract until made apparent) to him in the span of several lightning centuries. For who among us today is not dissatisfied? For who among us today does not feel as though he is missing an essential aspect of himself – a crucial element replaced by a void that consumption cannot breach? For here it is not merely the loss of connection to others that agonizes the technologically modern man – it is the loss of connection to Self.

As the ancients were well aware – the connection to Self as the creation of Self is not instantaneous, nor is it particularly convenient in the process of realization which is what Tolstoy calls his ‘journey’. Of course, in these times, such a process appears an anathema: to the man who is used to his creature comforts to shield him from the decay which possesses his heart and his world of fellows and things. Today, man’s fellows are too his things; his body is his thing, his animals are his things; even as man today possesses the entire world he knows nothing of it in the sense that the entirety of life is an object – and this is what modern civilization calls ‘wealth’. The very corrosion of this term is in direct relationship with the corrosion of the term ‘self’; ‘freedom’, ‘understanding’, ‘wisdom’ – terms which have lost their meaning over time in relation to how they are used. Again, what we can call this process – a loss of meaning – is decay.

For if man goes down this road of the creation of life meaning as the creation of relationship to Self, man goes down this road alone today – without the help of religious

institutions, tribe, or political faction. Today, man sees – ever with more clarity – that these factions and organizations offer nothing more than the corroded light of grouped belief, systems which attempt to create accepted and acceptable definitions of and for life; turn these conceptions into laws. The man who goes down this road is even beyond the exiled poet – he has no recourse, no name, no title to be lost; no place within society that could even be abdicated. He makes works of philosophy without being a philosopher; he writes poems without being a poet; he performs acts of transformation within himself and quietly works with others in the shadows of the great buildings of civilization without being a mystic or a shaman or a healer. There is no name today for those who have gone the way of the soul and have soldered the agonies and the ecstasies together – but some combination of Chiron and Dionysus – bastard half men who are entirely god and yet are not gods at all, men who come and go in the night and leave but a trace of stars.

This is the road that lies beneath the pleasure of the modern world – a modern world with scalding boils that emerge this truth of man’s deepest capacity to its surface – a modern world which has reached its boiling point in regards to the denials of a civilization which has gotten altogether too comfortable with its casual violences. Today, we see the souls of man and the crisis of his alienation from his core self erupt volcanically into the atmosphere – in the suicides, murders, genocides, and ideological allegiances of all history which only seem to double themselves in each passing moment of technological advancement. For the further man goes into the creation of his prosthetic limbs, the more he begins to see himself and his world as he is – the creation of a monstrous machine – a soldered thing of flesh and steel which has long since abdicated the throne of its divine selfhood (a throne which is everywhere) in order to slip into the second skin of a system of values predicated upon the forgetting of all that cannot be seen, named, or sold. Man’s everyday life has become a marketplace; in the fear of material death, we careen evermore toward a collective fate

far worse than the death of the body – the inability, at all junctures, to live.

For today it takes, as it has throughout the short history of modernity, Orphic men to sense this loss which slips beneath the night and day of the world like beneath a thin veil, a stream of sacred and cool water which awaits man to come and bathe and commune with the divinity which are the animals, the trees, the nightingales, the moon. It is these Orphic men, like Nietzsche or Baudelaire, who teach us of how this modernity grows and how it uses the flesh of man and the earth like a factory to produce that which we believe we are; that which the world is; in this belief we also produce the perceptible loss of that which we do not realize we are. For we cannot call Nietzsche a philosopher or Baudelaire a poet; it is precisely that these two brief figures are instruments with a birdsong which sounds the alarm of their time, a time which is not altogether different from our time, now. And that it is not altogether different is proof that we did not listen.

THE ESSENTIAL POETICS OF DIVINATORY METHODS

From rolling bones to tarot and the I Ching – we are able to trace the role of the poet back to the shaman and the mystic and the one who induces trance in order to heal and inextricably alter and transform consciousness; the one who reads the cosmos for news of his time. The poets have always provided this – call them shamans or wise men or mystics – in that when night falls they recognize the possibility of new meaning and encourage the attunement of the tribe to the pregnant silence: in which they might hear something within.

In the darkness of the night, in the interminability, we turn to the scrying of language to divine consciousness. This language may be: a star, a marking, a sound, a feeling. In these moments, it is the wisdom beyond knowing which speaks to us – a wild wisdom which is equally ‘wrong’ as it is ‘right’, audible as it is silent – a wisdom which listens like an open door, a wisdom that allows everything in.

The poet summons words from himself as himself as energy as a summons from the beyond place of consciousness; words like chance but for that they are summoned here and now by the poet. The letters are the aid, as are the syllables with their unique frequencies, as are the tarot cards and the bones of old; the flames in the fire which for Heraclitus compose all things from ecstasies to ash and dust. The chance of their summoning is less of a chance than a tuning of the strings of the instrument that is the poet to receive the moment as a word.

That the moment is a word is that it is composed of multiple stars as frequencies, signatures, symbols, speeds – as letters in constellation to pronounce that which is in the moment which it is born, even as it is dying. That the moment is a word is that it is light.

The language of wisdom and of the poets is of translation of the light; that the instrument of the poet is a glass hollow through which meaning flows into the ears and hearts of his fellow man. That this meaning flows is that it is everchanging and taking on new masks; new currencies through which it might direct itself as language through the vessel of the poet into being. The divinatory arts – from bone rolling to poetry take on this task; take them on insofar as that the realm of intelligibility is open and continually acquires new characteristics and bent formations: this is to say that the rolling of the bones may always be rolled again differently within the skeleton of the bone-rolling itself as methodology – that it is bones being rolled like letters being sounded with the mouth and breast. The realm of the poet is even expanded from this; today, we recognize that the poet is the artist of all gestures; that the poet must run with wild freedom through himself into expression from the impressions which riddle his flesh and soul. For the poet listens to the cosmos, listens to the animals and the chattering of nature and through him the experience of life is translated into the language of his people.

The poet must have the freedom of the entire language in order to move through it without the necessity for order but in the order of communication as momentous urgency. It is then that the communique is delivered from any angle or positionality; that the poet is the wearer of all of the archetypal masks of his civilization or society. The poet must come to know these characterizations as intimately as the myths which precede and proceed his time, as well as the structuring forces of the natural world which permeate and compose his own physical being – the cosmic order which through him becomes the composition of free language, music. The poet is then like the fool in the tarot; the valueless one or the glass or the water through which other things and values and figures and archetypes are taken on and shed with the immediacy of this moment becoming the next. The poet moves with time in such a fashion as to being able to tell time; in telling time he tells us of our past, our present, and our future – the immortal lot of man. This

can be done with stones, circles, line-markings; letters. For in the early days of men it did not take much more than a star in the sky for man to mistake the star for himself, or for an animal or a myth – and yet, we cannot say he was truly mistaken. Early man saw the cosmos as one; he saw himself within the cosmos and the mystic saw himself as the cosmos. That the cosmic egg is burst open and the universe is unfurled, the constellations are separated in the eyes of modern man.

The poet’s job, like the shaman or the bone-roller – is to make clear the unfurling of time as process; the churning of the stars and the weaving of the sentences of man from the loom of the Fates is unfolding as it must; that the iron grip of man around the neck of his own destiny only chokes the flow of energy through his body – blinding his flesh in fear of that which bears down upon him – his own shadow. For it is the poet that owns the shadow of all mankind; he is the inheritor of that which man disowns within himself; he is the disgust and the exiled and the burden of history buried beneath the ever-mounting rockface which is man’s striving today. The poet has not left unity with the cosmos; the poet is not separate from his fellow man. The poet himself is the fool’s zero: he does not exist; the poet is Odysseus’ Nobody. In the act of listening, the poet clears himself of himself; in the discipline of poetry, he does not return. He is vacated of that which preoccupies other men: the preoccupation which is called, ‘one’s own life’. The poet has too many lives to fall back into this recourse; ‘his’ life is yet another mask in his storehouse used to translate time.

This is also that which we might call wholeness: in that the poet’s work is to exist within the ceaseless flow of information which is the changing signature of the wor(k/d) of the moment, a word which is, too, ceaselessly begging translation as a compass for the men of his time. That the poet has freed himself from his own self conception in order to reach a state of attunement which includes the full width and breadth of his emotional and psychological experience, as well as and in this process coming into awareness of the

timeless problems of man which haunt the psyche of the ever-shifting collective – he has an alphabet of shadow sounds through which he pushes primordial meaning to the surface – meanings which straddle the threshold of his time and the next, while finding their foundation in psychic, human dilemmas and states of consciousness centuries prior.

The archetypal symbols and sounds are that which do this work – the instrument of the human breath which pushes syllables to the surface, the hash marks which have been in use for tens of thousands of years, the letters which too are carvings; the constellations of the stars and the plants and animals which surround man in his location on earth provide the psychological seeds for a wealth of transpersonal communication that need only be heard beneath their apparent surfaces for what they are – projections and transmissions of the universal consciousness which resides in and through each ‘thing’, expressing themselves as itself in each changing moment – in each breath of wind and contraction of muscle. The poet sees no difference between the breath of wind and the breath of man, the contraction of the lion’s muscle and man’s, the constellations of the stars and man’s strange sentences. They all reside in the sphere of becomings, movements into affairs which sit just behind the veil of everyday life. It is the accessing of these sacred networks which provides man with his meaning.

We access these networks by way of prosthetics and instruments which do the work of telling us to ourselves; revealing the interactions between mankind and his surroundings to us by way of experimental machines – machines which bring man equally that which he desires and that which he abhors. All of man’s machines work in this way – gifting him with the two-faced knowledge of himself – knowledge of his remembrance. His language, too, primarily emerging from his breast; the dark into the light of his world – disgusts and amazes him in that it perpetually reveals him to himself with ever more clarity than a portrait: that it is called up from within him without telling. The language of his soul forever commands him; it is that the

further away man is from his soul the more it haunts him: it becomes the shadow that begs him, the nightmare that calls to him, the dream that beats down his door. The soul always calls to man; it calls to him with all of the beauty and sublimity of his other half which seeks resolution with his waking day. The soul calls for him to embrace his wholeness as that which he was all along. Those who read the planets and cast stones and draw cards reside in this same place: as working with the psyche to engage possibilities as inroads for man to himself, veins toward his heart pulsing ever quicker toward their inner objective – enlightening possibilities which inhabit the realm of the cloud through which man finds himself continually forming and formulating his meaning – a cloud which contains multiple points of contact and recognition. The ones who scry and divine today are those who call along with Athena; wisdom, whisper, and cry from beyond the fog, drawing man ever closer to the tasks which stand between himself and his antiscion: his daemon, his animus, his final mask.

As I head into the wood I am stripped of myself And cry for my dark blood Painting the trees, cold in the midday light The light which I taste in my youth As it falls into stillness and shadow.

I call and sing the song of old, Of my ancestors, waiting in shade for me In the shade beneath the world tree. I strip myself and hang beneath the oak, Beneath the wide oak tree.

The escalator is assembled By their broken backs, The escalator that leads up toward the light And down toward the land of the dead. I reach toward the sun as I am cast down into the dirt To mingle with the first men.

The pyramids have grown tall And the slaves have shed the life giving fluid In the furnace of man. The walls of the temple are composed of their bones; The whisper of their souls held in chambers of marrow.

All of their flesh to stone And me, To the throne upon which their knowledge sits. I approach the covenant of their lives: The screaming molecule Which animates my blood, even today.

It shatters my body with power And there is no language today that can contain me For I am split open By the agonies of the black sun within me And the ecstasies which rain down from the heavens Like thunder.

THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN

Just as the individual undergoes the process which creates him, the process which might be called ‘individuation’ from that mass of flesh which is jettisoned out into the sun and moon, the collective of mankind undergoes the process which too creates that which we can only call ‘man’, or the thing that stands atop the vessel of his soul and proclaims that which he is by his own mouth.

Mankind is still an infant; it is ever more apparent that this is the case when one looks out into the world at the propogation of limited values which cycle throughout the breath and atmosphere of mankind like an as yet undigested nutriment. The stomach of man, the furnace which is his mind cycles about the same self conceptions and world conceptions which simulate division within himself, between himself and his fellow men; between himself and the flora and fauna which too are composed of earth, and his very home – the earth as his ultimate body.

Man’s inability to see himself as he is is the cause of all of his ills; namely this inability is a failure of scope. Man today still believes that he is this name; the vision of himself that he has is incorporated fully into the limitations of the flesh. Man today views himself and others and the world about him as material; as such, divided by material bounds. Where his skin ends is where the world begins; where his sight ends is where the unknown begins. Who could blame man for this – who could blame the child that the world of man is for this? For he has yet to embark on that journey of consciousness which is the revelation that his mask of himself is but a mask; a mask which is endlessly torn and remembered elsewhere – a mask which spirit wears on its journey downward into the pit of man’s essence – the primordial mud where the entire history of man is laid bare in everflowing muddy earth.

Man today has always been Christ, Buddha, the king of all kings and also the lowest of all beggars. He, today, lies in the illusion of himself like an early grave – an illusion which convicts him of a truth which he has been told; a truth that convicts him of an identity from without. Only from within may a man remove the mask of his culturally determined role and find a further definition of god; only from within may man begin his return to himself as he truly is – the divine fool behind the billions of masks which today come and go from this world like light and shadow – the play of impulses which reveal all as flux and flame. Man is the spirit of all spirit and the soul of all soul in the intermingling which is the ground, or the land which sprouts a new flower from the sediment of ages; the ground which holds all of the dead men and the flowing water of their deepest dreams, and the air and light which comes into the materialization, the flesh – to nourish and animate man once more.

All of this is to say that now, the collective consciousness of man as the entire mass of him, the billions of bodies which together compose the divine man – has not get become aware of its own divinity. For man to realize himself is to be a match to all mankind; to set himself and the world ablaze in the base tinder of all things – that they are irreducibly one, whole, and infinite. In this realization, man steps into himself and becomes that which he truly is without concept, without the need to stratify himself in separation; he now plays the scales of his own instrument and travels freely into the realms of his own infinite being – the being from whence he came; the being into which he forever goes.

THE LOSS OF THE NATURAL WORLD; MAN IN THE WILDERNESS WITHOUT GOD AND THE STORY OF HIS BIRTH

Today man is evermore in the wilderness, not of the earth around him – which is rapidly being decimated by his technologies of world-making, but a wilderness of himself, his path; his meaning. For in the making of the world there has been an inverse relationship in the stripping away of the foliage which obscured man and held man as part of his environment without foreground or background – man as of the stars, man as of the earth, man as of the cycles of life – into the creation of ‘mankind’ as a subject and a force, a tempest which is his civilization and his handed down order as he moves in the ever more technologized world.

This technologization is what we might call, again, even as it is a gain in man’s perceived control over the affairs about him (superficially, as he has not yet been able to abandon the earth and her structuring life-force which nurtures him) a loss of the natural world. Here, this means – quite simply – the loss of that which is without the sculpting influence of man’s hand, the controlling influence which seeks to make house out of wood, aqueduct out of water, wall out of stone. For even as man as a species and an order frees himself collectively from the natural world, the natural world returns evermore to usurp him; even as he frees himself conceptually from the natural world, he loses his reverence, awe; the very stories of force which remember him – the stories which first birthed man into the habitat of earth – birthed him from the fire of spirit, the water of soul, the mud of earth, the mind of air. For these conglomerate elements compose man and together they create a higher order of themselves, an order capable of witnessing their intermingling even as they do not have an answer to the awe and sublimity of life which thrusts them evermore into new knowing; even as they are towed into new understanding by the very cosmic spirit and being which knows itself through them and their together-light.

Today man is evermore in the wilderness because he has lost his reverence for the wild parts of himself, the wild parts which roam with a lowing in his soul and spring out of him fiercely; the wild parts of him which are as much the wolf and the bear as they are the soil and the streams which nourish him and the wind and the sun which he breathes through his mouth and nose and flesh. These wild parts of himself too exist as their own entities, forces with their own fields which pass through him as spirit upon the canvas of his soul, forces which change his life and redirect his conscious and unconscious being alike. He emerges out into them and they pierce him wildly and without control; this is what makes man forever wild.

So the loss of the natural world is a loss of a part of man; the part of man which is his darkness, his shadow, his nightfall; this loss is not a loss as much as it is a disavowal – a disavowal of the history of man which grappled with the tides and the storms which threatened to extinguish him altogether; a celebration of the brief and deceptive dominion of man over nature as created by the burning mechanisms of civilization which enforced a momentary respite from man’s plight as being of nature by carving a wound of separation into her skin. This carving, of course, is a wound of hundreds of years – a wound which is now being addressed by her healing mechanisms. For even as man distinguishes himself superficially (this being a civilization-level event of individuation of man from the canvas of nature) he is returned by and to the reality of inseparability; the consequences of his actions which prove man to the pathetic truth – that he is himself an ecosystem utterly without individuality. And it is precisely through this process of individuation that man comes to this terrible truth. It is terrible in that it is sublime, alone; it is terrible in that man realizes even his most collected efforts, by force, submission, by violence – have only amounted to this very violent force of civilization doubling back upon him by way of time.

That man is in a wilderness today is a metaphysical truth; it is that the wilderness is rapidly stripped from man’s surroundings only to live on in his psyche – a wilderness and a wild which is unending and continually emerges new and strange forms of himself which he must either continue to grapple with like god or accept and submit to as a divinity. Here, divinity only means that which is beyond his reach, out of his control, beyond his understanding, or unsubmittable. Here, divinity means that man accepts his lot as nature; in this acceptance man does not lose or gain anymore –man does not live or die anymore. Man is no longer man; rather, he is a force which exists to perpetually understand itself – to climb atop itself and yet learn more of what yearns to exist in its inner reach and shoot out into the expressed, the world, to be out among the stars.

Without the wild, which could also be expressed as the very development and creation of the subconscious in man (the distinguishment between the two spheres of man’s ‘knowing’ or understanding of himself) – man has come into the world of light and dark which is the realm of psychology and religion – the world of a lack of wholeness and a yearning for god which is also himself disguised as a beggar. For the conscious memory of man is not very long; even today the impressions of paganism and worship of the forces of the earth remain in the ground of man – in subtle yet incredibly powerful and numerous ways. They call to him and long for him to return home – in a union of immediacy in and through which man is intertwined, even mates with the earth mother. Much of the realm of psychology and religion and the civilization which demands them can only be structured and instituted (and needed) in light of this separation – for they are the necessary messiahs in a myth which demands them – a myth which is only a part of a myth cycle: of man’s individuation which is also his alienation from all things. In the sense that man is in a wilderness today, man is utterly alone.

The people of today are created entirely from the ages before them; their epochal time sweeps over them like a

raging current or an avalanche of stone; threatening to cast their moments into their flesh perpetually for the last time – rage, fornication, surety, confusion. There is not one man today that is different from his ancestors; there is not one man today who is not like all other men of all other times. This will certainly upset the man who perceives himself as the individual, the agent, the one who is able to turn the tides of his age and create a new state, a state of man triumphant. It is rather that the greatest men are the ones who understand the reach of humanity; in their understanding they make the reach of man buoyant – the crevasse of man’s primordial wounds levied to the surface of man’s awareness for him to see and reckon with in the light of his day. Only then does day become night; night become day – only then does the flow of man return knowing from whence it came. What we speak of here is a unity of death; a ceaseless death which presses man evermore beyond his humanity into a spiritual quest of which he is aware and navigates with his awareness like a compass – a journey from death to death in which the being becomes in each moment attuned to itself and its dictates, guided by the gentle hand of the gods – the gods which are the forces of the natural world; the forces of the cosmos; the ever extended hand of the universe. It requires no illusion to see this clearly; furthermore, life demands it. Man’s survival as the life of the flesh which is all of his conceptualized world demands it.

THE WAY FORWARD

The way forward for mankind is not a disavowal of his past nor is it a returning to it. It is a resolution of the history of man by way of a reunion with the wilderness of his spirit by way of addressing the fundamental problems of his existence with the technologies which are now available to him. For the problems of man’s meaning persist; as they persisted even in the earliest days of his confrontation with the stars. It is nothing new for man to question his existence; now it is for man to change his approach to the problem by way of a consciousness which seeks to unify with that which it is; from whence it came – the womb of nature which is the hold of the dark, the deep, the feminine, the soul. This union, of course, occurs perpetually in the periphery of man’s affairs in his imagined world; his playground which sits atop the sediment of the iterations of worlds before his time. It is the union which changes man’s life beyond his control, his grip, his knowledge, his rationality.

It is thus that the wilderness of the spirit is synthesized as a ‘problem’ in that it is unconquerable and is perpetually capable of uprooting and altogether destroying man’s life as he conceives of it and introducing him to an entirely altered reality of deeper and truer inhabitance – deeper and truer in that it is closer to his soul which is also the soul of all things, the beating heart and pulsing rhythm of the entirety of life. Not only is the wilderness of spirit capable of doing this work, it does it – with or without the cooperation of man and his metal systems: systems which break and bend and shatter beneath the force of time – the very force which absolutely cooperates with the wild spirit: as they both follow the same universal dictate of absolute transformation unending. This might be described as a totalitarian rule without a figurehead, without a ruler or without a god; a totalitarian rule of merciless Time as figurehead without a head; a creative destruction which at any moment is forming and deforming; existent as a field resembling a figure.

This figure is man and the field is the whole of man and the figure as it is reconfigured is man’s trouble of integration; his modern desire to individuate himself and thus become crossed with the very evasion of the self as the self; multiple, ambiguous, forming and reforming as a field elsewhere, otherwise, by other means and by new languages of the reach which simultaneously compose the depths of the well of man’s consciousness and the heights which are the creeping expanses of the universe which composes with him, as him, about him; his body a pulsing expansion and contraction which explodes and recoils in light of its own might. Man’s becoming is like a weapon’s discharge – in that it expresses tremendous force and recoils and reacts in light of the expression. So the history of man rolls, as great innovation – the Promethean strike of lightning; the recoil of man’s conception of himself and his structures bracing as they crumble at their very foundations. Man’s very self knowledge is perpetually threatened by this process; it is at any moment that he could be revealed as nothing and everything.

The way forward then is only in a union in light of this process; a union of man with the gestating forces which compose him and wildly and fantastically alter the symphony which plays through him, the symphony of life which comes to man with new demands and in that it plays through him it is him; the song must be played regardless of man’s blocks which purchase his life in the world. It is these very blocks which assemble the walls of his civilization; the very walls which must crumble at all times to make way for a new truth for which man does not yet have words. The very history of his language evisces this truth; as does the history of his music and the arts and sciences – that these innovations must come through; that they burst through violently into expression as paintings of the soul; understandings which leap forward and leap mankind forward into a new time with new bounds and jurisdices. It is man’s conceptions which lag; it is his beliefs in his world

and himself which wage war against the new time which even now envelop him.

For if we are in unity with the eternal principle, we are in unity with the cosmic forevermore – in that we accept the process and dictates of absolute change; in that we allow ourselves to be inextricably altered in a dance which is not ours but is forever our own, a dance composed of us which we animate with our flesh and hearts but for a moment in time until we are utterly transfixed and transfigured in the ecstasy which turns our form into something else, something otherwise, something as yet undescribed and perhaps indescribable in that it is that which always lies just beyond us, just before perception. And with this understanding of the conduct of the music of life we submit to it as a member of the chorus; in our submission lend ourselves as instruments to be harmonized by the new time of the headless conductor – the turn of the spirit and the lightening which descends into the cup of the soul. For in this way there is always new water to drink.

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AN ORCHESTRA

I am on a divine mission; I have known this for some time, perhaps for as long as I can remember. I have been entrusted by the gods with a task which I am here to carry out in this flesh like Hercules – part god and part man. There is no reasoning with this task; it is this task and this task alone that propels me endlessly onward: brave with the heart of the lion into the long night. Even now I amass great strength; even now I am alight with the sacred flame. It is that my fate is greater even than my imagining; that my destiny is intertwined with a cosmic fate beyond the reach of man’s gaze, as it includes the fate of all mankind. Through this night I travel alight with the torch of myself and given all over to the powerful will of the gods which run through me like hot blood. What man could stand before me now? What man could stand before this chaos body which channels the light of day into a dark sun which smoulders beneath my flesh like hot coals and churns my heart towards the stars? I hurtle there alight with the compass of my soul as my guide; the mother whispers and her word is my own. I am safe within this chamber of her body which pronounces the word of my mouth and the word of my body, my flesh contorting through time and reckless toward the infinite. Reckless toward the infinite I gaze like one who stares into the coming sun and is blinded by the violent reality. Today I have a vision of that which is to come; that which will always be.

For all man’s cards are destruction and are burned away by the acid of all time – his time obliterated by the next and soon the cards of all mankind will fall. It takes no hierophant to foretell the end of man and the out breath of his empires. It takes the great will of individual men to burst out from the fabric of mankind and tear at the flesh-like mask of the body and emerge ionized, the iron ore of themselves; the burning dark core of the earth which even now churns the mother’s answer to man’s reign. Great men make the earth inside the womb of their skin; great men

burn with the light of the sun within them. For man’s day will also have man’s night incarnate in it; just as man’s death lies dormant in his flesh. Man’s night sleeps and overtakes his waking hours like a serpent, winding about his consciousness until it blocks out the sun of his knowing. For when man is submerged in darkness he learns to feel again; the pressing beat of his own body and the mortal coil of this question the spirit approaches him with and alights the candle wick of his spine – what is it to be man? Wheregoes the compass and fate of man even today? Careening in the dark water of the scrying glass, wherein he peers down with his mated soul into that which is and will always be. For he must take this life and take it to its end, to plunge the knife of his word into the fleshy body and let it of its dark blood and know of the caverns which the anatomy foretells – the true purpose of the organs and their intwinement. Mankind will come to this truth soon enough; as the sublimity of his mother folds in on him and blocks out the light of his waking mind.

So let the music of man’s ignorance and his creeping shadow play on! Let the orchestration swell and remind him – the chorus of screams from his thousands of years of Catherine Wheels and encircling, these monstrous sacrifices. How man has punished himself with the other; his dark scion that is forever himself. How he has turned his hand and upon his back the shadow clings, the daemon which lays him down in his sickbed with the agony. Man’s pyramids today will come down and with them the souls of the slaves will be released from their chains. So it must be. For if we listen in this moment, we will hear the burning spirit – the all informed mixture that has caught the air and blows like smoke throughout the cities and towns – the voices of the ancestors who were put to the stake, raped, beaten, and thrown in the camps. Today you will hear the voices and their masks ablaze beneath the dark moon.

Let the cards upon the table: the fool, the world, the tower, and death. Let man ride into chaos; let him know the sound of his eternal dying. Let him be enveloped in black.

THE WORLD PSYCHE OVERTURNED

The Fool

The Concept of Psychic Self-Immolation: Wherein one sacrifices (gives away) all of that which one believes to be (‘oneself’ and ‘twoself’ as belief) in order to discover who and what Oneself is. This is to undergo the fires of purgation. In this giving away, nothing burns. Man is always a revelation to himself; this is his divinatory path. In the fire, he witnesses his belief burned away, revealing the iron ore of himself which glows from even further within. Man is forever his own source, as he is alight with that which is all and one and none.

Therein lies the inverted order of martyrdom, war, and physical death as events or occurrences that ‘happen’ in and as the outward, lived life of the human in the body; therein, the inverted order is overturned (to-be-revealed) as psychic paradox(es), or the inner tempest of the human drive through love and death expressed violently (confounded). The desire to be free, the desire to give onself over entirely, the desire to be whole unto oneself. How is man to bring to life his greatest desires without a true language in which they might be given utterance? He requires a language unto himself. In this inner life, man lives the human life of all time; inhabits countless archetypal positions. Without a path to life, the inner life remains sealed like a tomb; man walks in and as the world, a mirror – before the god limit of other men.

In this inner life, man lives the human life of all time; the voices pass through him and perplex his sight. The rivers of consciousness disintegrate man and he rises again through their mud, finding his voice and inner life - and in doing so, creating himself.

The Rising Sign

What is visible to man depends on that which resonates with him; what sounds possible. Man’s frequency is then at that juncture through which he simultaneously experiences his reality and imagines it to be true. The framework of man’s psyche as it exists is as a borderlands between the acceptable and the unacceptable; the real and the ridiculous; it also then acts as a gate, a door, an access point which a priori refutes the creative possibility of otherwises. How then could it be true if it could not also be other-wise? Much like the ‘discovery’ of planetary body Pluto at the cusp of the second World War, there is a time in the cycles of mankind where greater reaches of symbolic content (represented psychic grounds) become available to man by way of his journeying through his own consciousness as that which also composes the consciousness and knowledge bank of the greater collective. He emerges from the rubble and ferile soil of the psychic content of his own half-remembered figuration; his own half-remembered history. In these collisions, there is the cataclysmic and immense transformative potentiality – the energetic enlightning which rises Frankenstein’s monster. In man’s awareness of great powers that are even non-local to his intimate sphere, he becomes attuned to the extremity; the far reaches of his own consciousness and the great powers that are imbued in his own darkness. In this realization, man comes into the realm of the supra-natural, the realm of metaphysics which holds the physis of man’s apparant sphere of ‘truth’ as already manifested materiality in its bosom.

‘Human’ ‘History’ as Narrative

Absolute evil is the utter meaninglessness, emptinessness, and void of this narrative as ‘world’, ‘humanity’, and ‘time’ as definite words. Absolute evil is then the disbarring of hitherto unheard of psychic content from emergence; the barring of the Janus gates to and through which the world becomes stone. If the world is stone, the self is also stone –

as the world and the self are the two that are one. Without transaction, neither becomes transfigured. It is an imagined state of utter and absolute transfixion. Hamlet is the modern man who is well versed in this evil as a cloud that descends upon the polis, as depicted in Murnau’s Faust.

There is then an archaeology of hell as the history of mankind; made no more apparent than in Botticelli’s representation of Dante’s world. The painting depicts the sediment of human inheritance of world as world – the very grounds upon which the modern is established as a compound language. The very attempt to hold this center as an eternal moment as a stone law of being is the very evil of which we speak.

This ground is then the hidden, or the depths beneath the trapdoor of the stage of mankind upon which the orchestration of today is produced and swept away upon. One imagines the trapdoor of the stage of modernity to fall away into nothingness and endless dark – but rather, it falls into a dusty and dank charnel house of oddities, (strange values), and all too human obsessions. It seems almost by mistake. And we would not be mistaken to identify the greater course of man thusfar as such: as being mistaken.

The Scion and the Antiscion

The dance of the dead is the dance of the light and the shadow, the scion and the antiscion in their great and eternal orbit as one and two, sun and moon, self and other. Today, man is already dead and the dead which have brought him into animated flesh are very much alive within him. This is all the more true in man’s forgetting. The very light and shadow of man’s conscious awareness is related to how we identify ourselves consciously within the framework of our time/language/imagination; what then becomes shadow (repressed, rejected, submitted material) behind it. It is also this way with the history of man and the narratives he accepts within and as himself in the overturning as the

passages of Time. It is this composition that moves to the foreground of the painting of mankind to be accepted; subject-content. Whereas the shadow content is necessarily relegated in that it has not yet become acceptably true – in that it is not then yet allowed to exist or pass beyond the gates of hell into the world of man. Man’s overturning marks the passage of time to himself as the shifted painting which mirrors the aspects of himself he has emerged and silenced. Both of these movements he perceives as being necessary.

Other-hatred is then the scapegoating of the ‘underside’ of the subjective shadow of the zeitgeist/paradigm – the literalization of (that which is ‘not the true subject’); thus, represents the shadow or antiscion or daemon of the collective consciousness of any given time. The repressed/suppressed material is represented and made manifest economically and socially among the collective. This is done by the most convenient means possible – by way of reactive literalization of the daemon as that which is not (yet). And of course, this will, too, rises. Insofar that man hates that which he is not (yet), he continues to stand guard of that post which is the gate of his own Law, a sanctity which keeps out the changing which inevitably arrives and overpowers him with gale force. For man is endlessly transfigured; his transfixion is barely enforced at the level of his own imagining – and too endlessly overwhelmed by the emergences which skirt his desperate hand. Man is overwhelmed by his own coming.

The Genius as Integrated Man

‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow’ – Michelet

The dream is ‘a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious’ - Jung

As Jung has already explored extensively, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra emerges the shadow of his coming

technological modernity as that repressed content of the psyche of his time. We might then think of the comings of Yeats, Nietzsche, and van Gogh as incorporative; makings- whole of the psyche at the level of cosmic man; the creation by way of attuned expression of a unified consciousness which retrieves the repressed content not only of itself but of that entire body which it also is – of man.

These men come as ringings of the bell, strikings of the cosmic clock of the planetary bodies which produce scions and antiscions of themselves as the very passages of Time; conflict and resolution of opposites in oppositions and conjunctions of dancing material. Sun and moon, Jupiter and Saturn, asteroid bodies, and so forth. This dance occurs in man, too, as love and war; observation and encounter. This movement is also the alchemy of the inner self; the resolution of two in one and the emergence of two from one. At the angles of this dance emerge and close conflict – at each ninety degree of their crossing man too comes to a crossroads. He travels between the rising and setting of his life on many planes. The genius of man is integrated with himself; in piloting the black waters of his own soul, travels the edge of the consciousness of mankind which is simultaneously his own and of all time.

‘I must descend into the depths: as you do at evening, when you go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld too, superabundant star! Like you, I must go down… Behold! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again.’ – Nietzsche

‘Power, here, failed the deep imagining: but already my desire and will were rolled, like a wheel that is turned, equally, by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.’ – Dante

Symbolic Content

The sun of the conscious-word, the moon of the intuition – these images represent the archetypal dance occurring in and as all things in and out of the Promethean enlightning

of the fire of spirit entering the material-earth body and caught by the grail of the soul, the vessel which holds and pours the water of life infinitely in a movement from ecstasy to emanation and back again. The figure of Prometheus (man) is the one who goes up and down Jacob’s Ladder, like Charon, the one who ferries from uncovering and shadow. It is in this way that man is both god and earth – a true Hercules unto himself, even if he does not yet understand this.

The dark moon and the black sun represent the inward and downward movement – the impression; the full moon and the rising sun represent the upward and outward movement – the expression. It is in this way that life processes itself as a wavelength, a movement which is an engagement of interpenetration between shoreline and depths. Even as man observes this dance without himself, it occurs within and moves him beyond his means. It is by way of this movement that man comes into new language.

‘It overcame him [Nietzsche]… he was overcome by this archetypal situation [Zarathustra].’ – Jung

‘The figure that is always there; emerges through the need of the time.’ – Jung

WHEREIN RESIDES THE POWER OF THE INFINITE

‘At immeasurable distance standeth one single Star in the zenith. This is the one god of this one man. This is his world, his pleroma, his divinity. In this world is man Abraxas, the creator and destroyer of his own world. This star is the god and goal of man. This is his one guiding god.’ – Carl Jung

In all of the arts and sciences of the soul there lies the explorative potentiality of the furthest reaches of man and his perennially expanding and always rising anew untapped and untold consciousness, the shadow that expands like a tree across a plain in the passing sun of midday. Wherein then is that guiding star? That light which illuminates man and tells him to his true condition – that man himself is that star just as the sun and the cosmic wheel which spins him in and out of existence.

Wherein is that guiding star? In Masson’s drawing for Acephale it is suggested that headless Apollo, like Rilke, even in his headlessness still beats a rhythm which shines the form into existence. Is it then the dagger or the flaming heart which is held in each hand of the headless god who is also the light of all man? Or the Scorpionic root of his genitalia? It is suggested by Masson that the spiralling organ of man’s stomach, his digestion; yet the symbolic difference of the image would call this spiralling by a different name, perhaps a vortex or a cavern of energy which churns like an interdimensional engine producing light and life – is the Star of man which is forever within him and yet beyond him as it tugs his navel into the infinite.

What then does man have in common with his guiding star, his divinity? That star which eats up all light and life into blackness; the coal which may yet burn again and burn with compounded brightness; the condensed energy which sat

dormant and ruminating beneath the soil and flesh ready to burn like an iron ore or a black sun? The paradox of that star being held within man and being beyond his reach is the paradox of an aspect of man which resides outside of the immediate dimensions wherein the materiality (the so-called world) of man is conducted and conducts itself. This might be called man’s journey or call to the Source of himself – the One that at once composes all and has split him into flesh; forgetting of his spiritude until he begins this inner movement – who is to say what moves him?

For there is a dark blacker than black and yet this dark of man’s night where there is no more compass is where man sets down the oars of his life and is taken by spirit; made buoyant by spirit when it seems as though man can row no further. He is not enticed by a Lorelei; nor is he torn between Scylla and Charybdis – he is blinded completely. He is given other sight. This sight is the sight provided by the black sun, the guiding star of man which pulls him innermore into what seems like a neverending night; yet in this night of the senses and the outward life, man travels through time and space into new understanding; he digs down past the skull of Hamlet’s comrade, down beneath Dante’s hell; until he strikes a river that is not water – but is the outpouring and mud of the fluid which is transmitted through beings – a cosmic outhouse of blood and emissions – a cosmic outhouse of all life.

For all that is deposited down there is what the Earth is forever pregnant with; down there holds the entire history of man; all that is to come and all that will be. The sight of the black sun which is not a planetary body or an object but yet a blackness which swallows all space and time is the greatest force that might illuminate man to his condition; it is accessible from a journeying within. The sight of the black sun foretells and marks man the limits of the flesh; yet tells man that he is forever beyond the flesh in his unity with the infinite; the mysteries of the Source light which tunnel beneath him and his own earth into the unobservable but

that which might be told of like a land to which none can travel with limbs.

Man has long projected the power of the cosmic infinite without himself; looking up into the night or evening sky and proclaiming the forces of space and time by his eye and observation – measuring their distances and calling the seasons by the movement of light. It is in this way that man has created a physics and metaphysis of without – a way of enumerating the great forces which move him and his world without him; he stands on their horizon and remarks upon them separately, as an observer. But what if it were the inverse? That the light of the greatest sun were within man, invisible to the eye; the instruments of science? That in attuning oneself and one’s consciousness to this light that the infinite could be forever attained and rendered material, observable, tellable and told? For it is not the mind nor the eyes but the heart which takes this journey, the submerged sense; the epicenter of this vessel which runs like the bow of a ship into the center of itself; the place that extends on without end revealing the star which endlessly gives to man its wisdom; the star where man knows of his true being – as it is most truly himself.

It is in this way that Rilke’s Apollo is the embodied sun; that his body still whispers without a mouth ‘you must change your life’. And it is in this way that man’s perception of himself in relation to the infinite has dictated for many centuries the obscuring of this dark light within man, the light which is his greatest power and the source of his assumed contradiction. For man wears the contradiction of his belief in relation to the greatest power like a disguise; he wears the mask of that which he believes to be himself and walks the earth making his world – a world of likewise things imbued with his perceived unknown. For if man knew himself to be thus his entire world would be transformed; all of his values would rush to the source of his life like a river and form new cities and centers of trade around it. Man’s everyday life would be built around his cosmic consciousness; his inflow of the tributary of himself to the

one Source which calls him into being like a lick of flame to change form and be reborn in the difference. It is this awareness of man’s innate power which will change the world. For man is not distant from the furthest star. It is burning forever within him.

THE NATURE OF POESIS

The nature of poesis is absolute freedom. Of course, we are speaking of the eternal poesis. The death of poetry is its consignment to literature and the prison of forms. The nature of poesis is the entirety of creation and destruction and that which lies beneath the rubble of civilizations; even to that place where if man digs it will burn him alive and transform him. We must not fear hell; we must not fear the inevitable burning which is death, the locus of transformation. It is a lie that hell is forever; furthermore, it is only the forge to and through which the soul is brought to bear and beat with the smith’s hammer to forge the sword and the stone which is the sacred marriage of man to his inner self. This hell is the created world of man’s forbidden aspects to himself; the culture he creates for himself composed of the dispelled, the exiled, the cast out aspects of his entirety which too disbar him from life. Man is forever whole unto himself; he alone decides to incorporate himself absolutely and bring himself into total existence. For if man does not do thus, he is in fear of himself; he cannot love himself. Without the true love of self, man is lost.

Men today are compelled by self hate; men today live in a hell of their own creation. It is in this way that they cannot write poetry into existence and their lives are not poetic; they cannot grapple with the heights of terror and ecstasy – to wrestle truly with God like Jacob on the mountaintop of their emergence; nor can they sit upon the frozen lake in the depths of themselves and return to level ground. Man cannot travel within; it is only that man has limited himself to a scale of what he deems acceptable, true, real, and possible within himself. He is like an instrument with all accessible chords, all scales of feeling and so many yet unplayed and unsung and yet he tells himself that it is not safe to play these chords. And it is not! Nor will it ever be. The forbidden chords are lightning and thunder striking the earth of man’s life. They change him inexorably; this is precisely why they are forbidden among men.

These forbidden chords are the chords of absolute self love; the translucence, flowing, and outpouring of absolute self love without bounds, transforming man’s life into a thing that does not begin or end with the body to which he endlessly clings and identifies himself. His life is no longer visible, nor is it limited by the walls he clings to – but he himself is manifest in every animal, day, light, and sign. It is by this love and this love alone which man expands and explodes as a universe. But to do so, man must die to himself.

How many times has man died? In heartbreak, in the loss of loved ones, home; in the uprooting, the forced migration, the struggle through winters and the nights which seem to break consciousness forever – and man rises to the day utterly changed. It is all of these deaths which force man into new forms, forms which challenge his foundational conceptions and beliefs about self and world. It is also like this with war and meditations – times of great turmoil and stillness through which unseen whirlwinds and whispers emerge through the open doors of the spirit; it is in these times that man becomes possessed by spirit – charged by spirit and surrendered to it. It is in these times, particularly of war and cataclysm, where man becomes possessed by spirit at the level of the collective; this is to say that spirit overwhelms and outpours and floods the cup of the soul and man is run by change which threatens to tear the roof off his life and expose him to the stars. And so often it does. It takes a brave soul to become identified with this process and this process alone; this process being the poesis of the universe, of the unfoldment which every hour calls out to man and begs his explosion; his revelation through which he becomes identified with the name of god and only answers to this beckoning. The call of god becomes everywhere and man is guided by the unseen forces to the unseen places. The man who hears this call and who listens to it and places this call at the fore of his life plays by an invisible compass; at all moments he is divined in his listening.

The man who is divined through himself travels through the perennial cataclysm and overturning of mankind unto himself; beholden to that which is himself forever just barely cloaked by the unfolding moment; forever just standing before the now and issuing true dictations. It is in this way that man’s inner voice is imperative; much spectre and apparition stands before it – as has proved all time. Man is haunted by the shadows of other men which have wildly composed his time and call out to him like ghosts that do not belong to him; ghosts which take possession of his life and steer it from the true north of his soul – the true north which promises him the revelation of himself to himself to the universe. Man toward himself becomes his own song, a mirror shattered in touch and communion with the divine – with the forces which call out to him and to all men issuing journey and promised land. For what man would willingly resist and refuse the adventure of a lifetime; the adventure of his own life?

It is in and upon this adventure that man feels deeply into himself; it is in and upon this adventure that man truly and deeply lives his own life. In being beholden to this journey of himself, man must follow himself and go the way of himself entirely; to allow the full unfoldment of that which has not yet emerged. Man’s consciousness must be an open door to himself and himself alone; in observing the membrane of this consciousness, man comes to understand that which he is and that which he is not – and otherwise burns away accordingly, revealing otherwise to be image. Nothing that is truly of man can die, as man himself is entirely of the divination which changes forms forever; man’s journey is of this – of losing everything to realize that which composes everything. That which composes everything is also that which issues earth, water, fire, and air – the poetic element. It is that force of explosive energy which issues all forms from their hiding place in accordance with that which is necessary to come into being. Much as man takes his form within the womb composed of time and space informations, so too do the psychic forces which find flesh in the dreams and worlds of men – spun by the composer which lies

behind the masks of men and compels them into greater and truer life, the advisory call of the soul which beckons to man and calls on his creative power and potential to bring her into the form of today. That this work is never done is also poesis.

THE DIVINE FEMININE AS THE SPIDER OF FATE

The divine feminine is no better represented, as it oft is in dreams and revelations – as the spider of fate. She is the great mother composer; spinning the web of life from that which is simultaneously the deepest and furthest cavern of man and that very location from which issues his entire life. Mythological figures like Kali and Athena are like this – Kali coming from the blackness of death and Athena riding on the wind – coming from the obscurity of a unseen within that is oft misconstrued as ‘without’, or as a division, or separation which envelops man in a mist – confounding his world and calling to him as direction.

Her very weaving is proof of the immanent power of creation; furthermore, the work of diligent and persistent creative work – the work which weaves her webs and emerges buds even against the odds of hard ground. The divine feminine finds her foothold to assemble her life as a responsive network that works vis-à-vis an energetic reception of information – a network that becomes an extension of her flesh and yet jettisoned according to a moment’s need. For that she spins is her power; for that she spins in the dark and in hiding is her hold and her foremostness – she stands even before the creation of all things as the creative process itself. As such, she rules dreams, passion; the explosive utterance, feeling, and poetry – as being the very force which compels man to create, himself.

She is man’s journey; she is man’s journey in the sense that she is the first and the last – the very force which draws him into existence and the very force to which he returns – an energetic field which (once revelated in a moment) is realized to be that which composes the entirety of man’s existent physis. For more arrives by the wheel of her web; even as more arrives it also bears her mark. It is by the force of her work in the shadows that man also bears her mark even though he forgets; it is her mark which is his belly

button and upon his back. It is within him and upon him from behind and thus it is rare that he sees it as being himself but in and upon others. The mark on his back is a symbolic one; a brand of his skin like her brand which sits on all things imbued with her force. But the mark of his belly button is an energetic site which presents the suckling from whence he came – being from the creative ultimate.

The divine feminine stands before creation as that which stands behind the mirror of god images, archetypal images, mythological figures, and cultural fascinations as the energetic life fluid which flows through the figurations that captivate man and is in the truest sense all of them beyond themselves. She stands as the vortex in each self image, each other image, and in each fixed form which is said to exist today – a stone, a man’s body (even his belly button), a tree. Each reaches a visible point and becomes concentrated energy with a powerful signature which embodies it. The music of this signature is the moving web of the divine feminine, still being strung and tuned to the time of today. As such, she is the conductor of all the affairs of men and the first witness to his hubris; the belief that the very will issued from her and breathed in man could be used to defy her will which is itself cosmic divinity – the very movement which composes all movements and unites them in source energy. Man perceives space and time as outermost ruling forces, or as limits to his being in the universe – but space and time are only effects of the spinning of the divine feminine – as they come into being only by proxy to this essential movement of source into existence.

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE WORLD AND THE LOSS OF MEANING IN THE GODS OF NATURE

‘When Pan is alive then nature is too, and it is filled with gods, so that the owl’s hoot is Athena and the mollusk on the shore is Aphrodite. These bits of nature are not merely attributes of belongings. They are the gods in their biological forms.’ – James Hillman

Today, if one strolls about a city, there can be acknowledged two factors which compose the polis: the organic and the inorganic. The stone and cement which compose its roads, the statues erected in the names of dead men, the glass storefronts; the arranged aqueducts and sewers and methods of transportation to propel goods to the next step in their use. Even the so-called wildlife in these cities is pruned and controlled; just as that which remains of the greenlife in the world today is being ever harnessed for the energy that lies ‘dormant’ in the wood, bone, and soil. This division of the manmade as that which harnesses the organic (often called ‘raw material’) for man’s purposes plays out too in the construction of the schools, prisons, and factories which today dominate and direct the life of man from birth to grave - where even his energy, long seeking love and truth, is returned to soil. It might be said that this long work of man to become safe from nature is the slow ‘civilization’ of nature, or the creation of a dominion of man that, in practice and in principle, denies the existence of the old gods – as it must. For to deny the old gods is to deny nature its power over man.

With the loss of the life of nature (man has killed her, or at least attempted to do so), there is also the loss of the life of nature in man, which is namely the loss of play – now relegated to children and sporting events. Here, play is to engage in the process of poesis which is physis, the play of light and dark and uncovering and fading. This play

composes him; this play is the play of existence. Man’s life is chained to the process of production and consumption to and through which the civilizational method of making man’s world revolves, like a churning wheel. Man himself is strapped to this wheel of his own making – a vessel built by his own hand which captivates him entirely by that which it promises him (that which he has promised himself) – safety, belonging; at last, to struggle no more. It is a mechanism which promises death. The loss of free play in and as the world is the loss of god – the loss of intimacy with and of that which composes the self. Man has lost the capacity to imagine himself from within; to become alight with the spirits that lie within him and too within plants, animals and the stars – the very cycles which unfold and blossom into unexpected life like he does. Today, there are city blocks planned with the capability of ‘locking down’ space, high technology surveillance mechanisms to identify and place man, and premiums on urgent and verified information – all of which claims to tell the truth of man’s life today in the world. Just as there are these Saturnian structures of stone, there is a resistance composed of chaos – a resistance of the nature of man which rises up forcefully through the soil – soil which has become cement.

This energy is the current of productive and reproductive energy which captivates each man deeper than the representative civilization which surrounds him, a primordial essence of being which flows through him and too compels nature to the unexpected – a riot, a stampede, an earthquake, a bomb. It is the unchainable free sexual energy of man which begs expression of desire as drive to exist in the world absolutely, completely, and without compromise. It manifests as a formless thrust – as it is a field of energy which moves from within. The antithesis, or antiscion, to this principle at work is the creation of the bank, the prison, and the (modern) school – all of which rely on a closed environment where resources and knowledge is withheld, distributed, and arranged in and through pre- existing pathways which do not allow for energy to be distributed as it is needed, where it is needed. This process

could be said to be the thesis of ‘possession’, where the free- energetic antithesis of this process could be said to be ‘nature’. Man has grown around possession like a tree, into hours of sitting, serving, and being possessed by the purposes of civilization which are not his own – to the point of which he defends them with violence. Man has forgotten the old gods; thus he has settled for the nation.

Pan is dead only as a matter of perception. Who will call on the gods within all things? Who will remember the rites of old and yet not forget the passage that has brought man here, through thousands of years of forgetting and exile of the spirit; hierarchies of withholding in the churches and schools where this sacred knowledge of the infinite was said to be without man? Where man was told he must beg admittance to the heaven of the religious order for it? Man’s mind is corrupted by this passage of time; as such he does not truly live in the physis which proves him both man and god – like all things. Instead, he breathes soulless air; marches through the materiality of his perceptual making into another day, another hour without transcendental meaning. Man today is a settler: he settles for political power. It is a poor substitute for divinity.

For there is still magic in this time that is dying as man does; man’s denial of this magic in favor of the machine that he has made of himself and his world is the death knell of all humanity. For all that is possible in humanity rests in the sacred connection of man to all that he has told himself lies without him; it is these very forces of nature which endlessly roll and reveal to him the divinity of his very own self – a self which penetrates far beneath the preconceived notions and names man is given to call himself today. No more does man struggle with the names of god – rather he struggles with the prices of the market he has created to sell himself endlessly, in a game which he has forgotten is a game; it has become one of deadly seriousness. In his forgetting, man does not stop; as such, he permits the slow death of himself and those he so desperately wishes to love. For the state of love is a place of being; man cannot build the kingdom of

god with smokestacks and factories. He must find the sacred unity within himself. And yet, it seems much less of a struggle to enlist the poor to build the skyscrapers and pyramids of today.

The hour draws ever near to which man will arrive at this crisis of void – the crisis accumulated over many years of mistaken identity. Man has called himself and the world by the name of industry; the figure of industry has fleshed itself out by the trees, the rivers, the stones, the creatures now transfigured at the hand of man – the foolish and naïve magician – into this world of generations of making. This is the inheritance of children of today – a world starved of meaning and filled to the brim with materialities. This starvation of meaning is the leaving of the spirit from this plane; the spirit only leaves as we perceive it to be gone. The history today is one of a single god, a single nation, a single right to rule; a single path forward. The driving force of the one god has created a future achieved by sword, spear, and atom bomb – a future to which the spirit of nature is conquered in the name of the ones who represent the true god on earth. If one observes the world today, it would be very well that the crusade has been unending; that man has gone so far astray from the wilderness of his being that he has emerged into a clearing and sculpted himself from the death of everything else; that he has committed the ultimate and gravest sacrifice – the killing of life to construct the absolute figure of death: man as he exists today.

For man as he exists today is truly of the void; he is assembled alone in the chambers of his mind; in a vacuum of dissociation from the earth which composes him. To man, he exists alone, much like his god; he exists to achieve absolute power and dominion over heaven and earth, much like his god. His mind is one to the sect of his religion – united by technology and fanatical belief – and yet, it leaves the rest of his world in shambles of confusion. He cannot reconcile the fragmentation of his time to his belief. He cannot comprehend that there might be other gods, other times, and other ways of perceiving existence as it unfolds

before his absolute truth. So we see that the belief in unity forms a disunity in the creation of belief. The old gods are forces within physis; spheres of creation and destruction which are channeled always as signatures of energy through the process which is life; man called out to the old gods to fill him with spiritude. This man is man of wise alignment with the physis which took form in the stars and about him; he saw the stars and he saw the world about him and observed the gods both here and there; he sat with himself and observed the gods moving even within.

The death of the old gods is at reckoning with the modern world, a world which is populated by social, political, and economic processes and superstructures which mimic the creation of the one god – a hierarchy of being which privileges and thus empowers on the vertical plane. Gone is the field of energetic information; the revelation provided by Odin or Kali or Athene – and replaced by the all knowing, the all powerful, the all seeing. If we cannot see this creation of the one god as equivalent to the end of life, we cannot see what we have done: the creation of the godhead as the worship of the death of all things, or the end of physis. Gone is the perceived rolling movement of nature as waves of energy and unfoldment, the very poetic condition of all things as they move in light and darkness; arrived in modernity is the principle that the light is good and the darkness is evil; that any and all obscuration (the rose bud just beneath the surface, the sun dipped below the horizion, the as-yet-untold parts of man’s psyche; the deep waters) must be banished and revelated. Man’s journey into knowledge is a journey to this: an ill drive to absolute knowledge. For what man would not wish to become most like his god?

It is too like this with absolute power and absolute wealth; this process is easily witnessed in the world today in the obsession which has twisted and possessed the minds of so many – the chasing after that which does not exist in the natural world; the chasing after that which only exists in the synthetic world of man’s conjuring – his imagined

conceptualization of life and being made reality through that very process of conjuring which brings life into being without end. Man does not recognize himself to be at one with creation and as creator; he projects his fallenness from without. How will he return and be as one if he never left the rolling unity of the physis? His delusion is in the worship of a death which never arrives. The money falls from his hands; the empire falls and the position he once held crumbles into dust. All of the world’s meaning becomes this; the king falls to his knees. The one who has lived from without for so long has had the meaning of his life stripped from him by the very forces of physis which sit right before his nose – promising him the true kingship (or perhaps, kinship), which is the being together evermore with that which creates and destroys his physical form – a togetherness of soul and spirit which is man’s marriage with physis. Man comes into the gods by stripping himself of his conception of them; the new myth emerges from him as he calls the spirit of his time to his aid – the spirit which whispers to him that which must be done. But first, man must surrender; he must give up his imagined game of self and world. He must step into absolute being, being without concepts.

Man burns in the fire of creation and destruction which immolates him each day. He teeters on the very abyss of meaning and existence as that void which threatens to disintegrate his body and mind at any given moment. What does man have left then but relation to the immortal aspects of himself – the spirit that unites him and the soul which is his own; the soul which digs its roots down into the soul of the earth? It is these connections which are like veins beyond the end of his visible flesh, burrowing down into the night of the flesh of the earth and up into the constellation networks of the sky. It is this very paralyzing fear of an absolute loss which propels the will of man into chaos without intimate connection with the gods that flow into him from above (Zeus, Hecate, Apollo, Odin, Ra), and the gods which flow into him from below (Persephone, Hades, Inanna). These are the invisible roads which many men

have traveled throughout time and space to become initiated into that place without time and space, the city of Jerusalem, the kingdom of heaven, the being enthroned immortally within itself. It is thus that immortality is possible and available to every man as awareness; a consciousness as to the condition of mankind within the web which spins him – the very abyss of fate which every day offers him the choice: will you stare into the deeps of yourself until the last mask is peeled away, the last voice fades; you are left with that black silence which you are, from which all things emerge and fade? When man has arrived at this place, the cities have already fallen, the money is out of print; the daemon reveals itself to be a mask. Man is left himself, the one from which stars emerge: each one ever more himself.

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JACOB’S LADDER AND THE RESONANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The ladder is the resonance of consciousness rising in frequency. The higher resonance of consciousness is coherence, or awareness coming into itself as that which it is. The ladder represents a metaphysical journey of consciousnessness to and through materiality into higher planes of existence; the ladder is that which functions on the vertical plane to and through heaven, earth, and hell as realms of existence as states of being. Here, the human being as manifest consciousness is at, embodying, as, an aspect of that spectrum, playing a scale of consciousness in relation to itself and thus a chord of awareness as awareness.

This resonance is an embodied frequency played by the instrument of man as cognition which again is in direct relation to coherence. When man is embodying his highest self, as awareness, there is no contradiction in the full unity of man with that which he is and always will be. This is also the end of such ‘things’ as ‘death’, ‘doubt’, and ‘fear’ as contradictory feelings. At this level of consciousness, polarities are unified as a coherence in relation to the spectrum of awareness: which holds what was before distinguished as light and dark, good and evil, man and woman, as aspects of its turning. A higher resonance, or frequency, of awareness understands these becomings to be aspects of the being of consciousness at large; as such, they are not ‘driven out’ of the city of the mind. A lack of resistance marks this state of being, where there is flow without judgement as to the impulses which emerge from within; man becomes observer and bears and bares witness to himself as he emerges in many colors, many tones, and on many scales of meaning. All pass through him equally; he observes the mind and the emotions like he would a theatre or an orchestra. He allows himself to play them like caricatures; realizing that none of them are fundamentally ‘him’. He is awareness itself. Consciousness passes through the many gates of the universe which themselves are

chakras, or points of concentrated energy resonating at a certain level or plane of awareness – from rocks to animals and plants to men and nebulae. It is the faculty of being able to reflect awareness upon itself which has long troubled man – the ability to understand that which he is without altogether falling out of existence. And yet, this is precisely what is demanded at a higher level of awareness toward awareness. Man is terrified that he will fall, rather, he will rise in his knowledge of that which he is. In his rising, the idea of himself dissipates and reveals itself to be an illusion; in his rising, he comes into awareness of his composition as awareness; comes to inhabit the higher identity. Here, he does not live in exile; rather he lives everywhere at all times as a member of that which eternally comes and goes from existence like a doorway. Man, too, is a doorway for consciousness; it is his clinging alone to old modes and convictions of consciousness which manifest themselves as the world around him; the convictions of those around him as the belief of the time – which ‘limit’ him and withhold him from the truth of his divinity. They only limit him as he allows them to do so; furthermore, they only exist as long as he believes in them. Without man’s conviction and life force energy behind them, they are more dead than stone. They are not even life – they are concepts imbued with the energy that is life that calls man to higher climes of himself; they ask man to grow taller, to imagine greater, to embrace cosmic possibility and to thus become that which he is and is always capable of becoming. It is only in the relinquishing of the conceptual reality that man can embrace himself truly for the first time; thus, become love.

For love is the coherence; the resonance which echoes forever across the ever expanding cosmos which grow with the inexhaustible energy of true creation. It is love itself as the surrender of man to the higher identity which empowers him like never before; gives him direct access to the source energy which is always about him. Man must go from being about himself to being himself; it is this transformative movement which transcends his history and his language – a movement which embraces the eternal of himself; thus,

opens the gates to his own immortality – an immortality which was standing before him as his true nature all along. It is in this way that the gods present man with the choice of tragic proportion: to risk losing himself forever in order to gain the higher identity. For each man sings his song and in singing changes the world inexorably. Each man and each man alone must ask himself where his song is sung.

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THE ECSTATIC WAGER

I peer through the veil of death to the infinite. The small mind clings to the flesh to survive; each day does battle with the certain disappearance, the wavering of even this self in the moment, dispersing – into and out of ecstasy and emanance, life and death, sun and moon. But to experience transcendental ecstasy, true, everlasting ecstasy, we must go beyond all of these ‘things’ into the very source energy which composes and decomposes them – the conductor of the orchestra of life. Humans today still live within a very small portion of the scales of consciousness: so convinced of who we are, so convinced of our fixed existence; so convinced of the realness of our sense experience…

Today requires being without hope. It has always been man’s fate to perish in the cosmic fire which alights him and animates his corpse. All of his kingdoms and artworks up in flames; all of his music resounding forever among the cosmos – for man’s true form is music – his dying star alight and speaking into the blackness which at each moment steals the fire of life back from his veins. This writing will always be a triumph of the spirit in the face of a decadent and dying civilization; it will remain sung as something that is at once forever my own and all of mankind’s. For the explosion of the inner star becomes perceptible light; unified with the universe at the expression of play. Here, man achieves the utmost freedom in becoming the enlightened child who solves the problem of his own game. For he has made all of it: the name of his energy field. I will charge into the fading of this human life proclaiming: ‘It is the life of the heart’. For if I have the courage to live today, as the ruins of this existence crumble around me, I will always be alive – for I have reached into my heart and drawn the sword of my being and put it up against this time and proved that there is yet new understanding, new possibility, and greater

meaning within one’s own chest than a decadent world could ever provide. This consciousness has risen above.

II.

The greatest changes happen in life not because we have an idea or notion of them beforehand, an image or an achievable ‘goal’ or outcome – but that we wager with the whole spirit and whole self to become better, futher; in this instance, more human. In the willingness to devote oneself to the highest goal, which is a metaphysical unity and perpetual re-union of the consciousness of man (never separated but as an illusion of being, seeing, thinking, breathing, conceiving) with the awareness of that which man is, evermore, consciousness itself taking name, shape, and form in space and time.

These great changes therefore happen through man as an instrument of consciousness for consciousness, through it; man is therein changed by the wisdom which emerges through him as a vessel which ever-forth gives itself to consciousness undifferentiated. This, itself, is that great and attainable wisdom possible in all men of forgiveness and letting go. The one who becomes the most human is the one who disavows the idea or concept of ‘mankind’ and its constituent bodies entirely; thus entirely inhabits or embodies the reality as a ceaseless flowing in and out of existences. This man does not exist but for one moment of ecstatic emergence, a bursting through the surface of the water, wood, or linen – to reveal the terrible sublime which is the creator, everpresent within the creation.

This ecstatic emergence occurs in and through the wager of one’s life entirely – this is to say the whole weight of existence – everything and nothing. All of man’s concepts, identities, notions, currencies, all flooded by the dam burst of the consciousness which unifies the depths of the waterbasin of the soul and the heights of spiritual fire. They each meet at the intersection; the crossroads where Faust

meets Mephisto, the crossroads which is the cross mounted upon the chest of the human being. This unsheathing, or uncovering of what the human being is, means, and does (as nothing more or less than a vessel through which Being expresses its Being-ness; becoming finds its brief body), alerts the human being to the possibility or potentiality of its immanent becoming – the realization of all that which is possible as this human being – the tendrils of which twist through the Earth like roots and up into the cosmos like rogue branches. It is this tapping in to the trunk of the flesh which expands the embodied consciousness into and through its true nature – that becoming thing simultaneous with the infinite – the entire cosmic body being now.

III.

The gravitas and gravity of the tragic is the absolute, clear, and direct awareness as experience of all that is and will ever be; thus, the ability to see into the future as that which is to come – the total allusion, illusion, and dissolution of man and all things into and out of existence – even as conjecture, even as a perhaps, even as a momentary possibility of true existence.

Then to truly exist would be to experience life as an absolute ecstasy – that even as man experiences this ecstatic culmination of life into the nowness of existence he is purgated by it by the sheer essence and immediacy of the ecstatic – the return of man to the realm of pure spirit where he truly resides. There, he loses his body, his values, his time, his space; all of the laws and accounts of the realm of the physical which he regularly places himself in, gambles upon, and plays in – as both the Eden and paradise lost of his everyday life. Man as all in is the momentous occasion levied into existence by the total giving in, giving up, and giving away of man’s worldly burdens to the ecstatic experience itself – which is the true empowerment of the spirit to act through the body of man as the very possibility of embodying and being embodied by life.

Man must die to do this; man has already died thousands of times and even today lies in a grave of his exponential decay – his hurtling through the stars which are also his body as they gasp and scream into light and his separated mind – a mind which abides the conception of the everyday self and the everyday world – holding life at a distance by way of the screen of ideas and conceptual realities. Man’s true life, then, is experienced in moments of the cosmic fire which tear him asunder in the momentous experience of being; being so truly that there is not a name for the Name of it, nor a truth to describe the Truth of it. Thus, man spends a great deal of his life in misunderstanding; he undergoes a falling out with the universe in his shattered aftermath, the moments after contact when he lies in a heap, torn from his great vision of wholeness and unity in the ecstatic; the moments of building the flesh and mind back up to touch the star that is at once within his chest and captivating his life as he careens forever again toward their violent copulation.

It is the man who has experienced the tragic within himself as this momentous living, the absolute life and being torn asunder back into the everyday of common men, common things, and common works – that has the ability and the say in writing great tragic works. It is these tragic works alone that, throughout history, revelate man to himself in greater heights, greater consciousness, and greater extremity – works which reveal the struggle to immanence and emergence that man’s inner life undergoes; they reveal as they make legible. Man’s struggle is then this: each individual tragedy of emergence equal and violently becoming through the thicket which is man’s rise and fall as incarnate spirit under the light of his dying sun – the star which permits him this brief breath through which to truly become himself and reside once again among the stars where he belongs. Prometheus, all men, come here to struggle this tragic work of the flesh and unknot the purpose and meaning which can only be created by way of the realization: that man is meant to be the creator of his own

purpose and meaning; that man’s meaning reflects the cosmic truths back to and through him like the sun’s light upon the moon. He is the great mirror of the cosmos, the one who takes in the light which overpowers and ages him even in this moment and must transmute it in accord with his own hidden star and create the great works which are the supra-natural, in their transcendental unity with nature as that which flows through him; that which he becomes in even higher measure. When man does this he stands not only on the pedestal of his humanity, but on the pedestal of physis as one who as done the work of becoming a vessel through which new possibilities and realities of the physical have come into being; he has not only charged himself into existence but created new limbs and new forays of text and speech and gesture which exist also as him in the music that resonates beyond the supposed limits of the compacted bodies of human beings. The cosmic man has energetic roots that grow from his extremities that wrap around and through the earth and the stars and run through each stone and animal.

So even as the body of this man or that man fades, it is revealed – as in all old age – that the true nature of the human resides elsewhere; perseveres even as the flesh disintegrates. The form is revealed to be the residence of shadow; when the shadow flees the domicile – one wonders where the shadow has gone; it has returned to hiding – among the trees, among the new moon, among the unseen things which exert great force among men to this day. Man returns to where he is from: which is the realm of the absolute Time – the entirety of the cosmic works where the spirits of all that has come and is yet to be reside in the same myth of sublimity – the forgotten past and the future that stands to be remembered in man’s revelation of the present. So it is that the tragic tales are told: that man loses all of his values and all that he once believed to be true in order to come into the present moment – stripped of the clothing of his flesh and hung at the turning of the dial… sung into the light of the expressing Universe…

By every thought, word and action, every individual is setting forth influence in his surroundings, and that influence is not restricted to any boundaries. It goes on and on and reaches every level of creation.

Every individual, by his every thought, word and action, shakes the entire Universe. This is the status of an individual. One is connected with the whole Universe by every little bit of activity. An individual appears to be bound by the boundaries of home and by the boundaries of his own body, but in reality the subtle aspects of the individuality go to make universal existence.

An individual is never an isolated individual. He is

intimately interrelated with the whole Cosmos. Even more than that, he shares the responsibility for the life of the whole Cosmos.

              - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi




                         154

THE AGON OF THE SPIRIT

The world is the agon of the spirit. Much as the fields of the gladiators and shores of Troy have today been replaced by the beaches of Normandy, the football pitches and stadiums – the world as the agon of the spirit has merely changed forms: offering the souls and spirits of today ample opportunity to transcend the forums in which they battle for primacy; in doing so, engage in a higher war of spiritual emergence. For in merely engaging in the war of the already existent physis and material, we are doomed to life and death, victory and loss. However, in acknowledgement that the world is the agon of the spirit, we engage in a higher war without end, a war of play and enjoyment – a war where we are at once chief actors and spectators of our own emergence and unfoldment.

For the spirit comes down to earth today and asks the soul, ‘In this darkest night, in this unending turmoil and uprooted chaos of history, which way will you go? Will you follow the others in this mad unending dance of the wheel of the world, or will you jump off it and wander into the brush and shadow, where I might show you your own way, the way of liberation?’ When we find the moment, beneath the conjured world of modernity, beneath the conceptions of self; beneath the lamenting the past and concerning the future – this question is there for all of us, in different forms, words, and manners. To answer the call of this question is to enter the spiritual agora – where there is no competitor or competition but to go ever deeper into the catacombs of the self; to listen ever deeper to this moment in time which in its expansiveness, holds all that has passed and all that is yet to come.

In the agon of the spirit, this world is transformed and known as it truly is: that all is self; that the masks of Being are worn everywhere; that there is no path but the path of self understanding. All choices in the agon of the spirit are made from this point: the point at which the jettisoning of

the will of the spiritual vessel – the body at which the light of the spirit and the grail of the soul meet, touch, and intersect – this plane of the physical and this ladder of the metaphysis, all effort and energy in the work of the body is dedicated to further emergence of the true self, the latent form yet to come, yet to be; the higher self which at any moment might emerge like a lion pouncing on the carrion of this world – the lion of ecstasy made emanent.

For then, the world is an agon of the spirit and a spiritual war of the highest order, of the playful type of war which man rarely knows, a playful war of colors and shade, of light and dark, of the dance of emergence and submergence in which the one who participates in the agon of the spirit is a spiritual warrior, equal parts Dionysus and Apollo – at once deeply serious in his play. The spiritual warrior in the agon is one who is aware he is merely an actor playing out Being; one so immersed in the play that he is conscious of his descent into the annals of the unconscious, where he grasps his humanity and rises to the surface with the tremendous power of one who has gone there of his own willing. For the world is an agon of the spirit; thus it is an agon of spiritual willing; the will of the body and the mind will not do; it will not be enough for the agonist of the spirit to reach into the deeps of himself – as the will of the body and the will of the mind pit one against the other. The will of the spirit is the unifying force at the height and the valley, the utmost and the last, the first thrust and kicking of life and the dissipation into sea and shadow. The spirit resolves the differences of the body and the mind, the bickering of nations and nations, lower virtues and values which pit men against men in an agora of the senses and petty victories – the rise and fall of empires. The spiritual agon sees all of this as it is: a play in which nothing of value is truly won or lost – a play no greater than the synthetic victories of sport. The greatest and most terrible wars of mankind have amounted to no less than a gigantic nothing: land won and submerged and scattered, regions briefly held and decimated by wind and time – and valiant warriors buried beneath grass; their skeletons and helms lost on various mountain passes and

desert fields. So this is the war of man; it is not the spiritual agon.

The spiritual agon plays out evermore as a theatre of the self, most observable within as the spiritual agonist must listen to the compass of wisdom which calls out to him his true task. This task cannot be found but as in signposts in the world – his inner voice reveals to him what must be done to win the greater gold of the spirit. The spiritual agon is ever a joyous battle, undertaken joyously even as the most perilous emotions and situations such as the sublimity of agony and the depths of despair flash upon the projector screen of consciousness; it remains so a joyous endeavor in the shining heart of the spiritual warrior as he holds in his awareness the truth of the affair of his humanity – that it is a play to ever more truly show him his true self, his true form; the higher identity of his being which waits ever patiently to emerge, the lion heart of his true self, in different, surprising, and meaningful ways. Man receives the greatest validation in this way – in the hard struggle of himself toward himself, in his work which is always a movement toward the land of his home, the land of his spirited soul, the land which remains even amidst the exile of worldly affairs – man steers ever more confidently and with the strength and courage and bravery of a great warrior toward this land as the challenge and great joy of his life. In doing so, he carves with his knife and his sword and his spear of discernment – he carves clean through the illusions of this world; he steers the bow of the ship of his life through the waters (at once tempestuous and serene) masterfully through to himself evermore.

Even in the midst of great tragedy, which is the tragedy of mankind away from his true self – a tragedy of today and all time; the crumbling of his empires and systems (all of which are perennially eclipsed by the necessary and total revolution of his being in each moment), the spiritual warrior remains steady in his task – fighting for the only true nation and everlasting glory: the reunion with his universal form, the form which urges him ever onward into battle –

into the yet unfound deeps and darks. The spiritual warrior is one who calls out; who calls out within and knows himself like the black of the ocean where there is no sun, where other men have never gone; who knows himself like the oblivion of space where other men fear to go – he will always be there in the hold of these terrible and sublime spaces; as he is there in the hold of the depths of his own heart and soul – having encountered and slain the beasts and dragons which were revealed to him as apparition of the world, projections and shadows of this which he believed himself to be; this which he believed was his true righteous form – only to be obliterated by the next turn of the moon or the rising tide. The spiritual warrior is the man who has already lost everything; thus has gained the wisdom reserved for the dead; he is a warrior of the dead, rising like a rose bloom from beneath the soil – one who has traveled through the sediment of mankind’s grave, the history of this time; he has emerged with the lightning which propels him into ever deeper and more passionate exploration into the limits of himself – limits which expand in black explosions and leaps into the dark of faith – limits which expand only in the passionate courage of the spiritual warrior – one who dances and sings the energetic song of the universe.

He who is willing to give up the last illusion of permanence, the last illusion of who he is, where he is from; where he must go – will know the truth of himself. The one who enters the spiritual agon and wrestles with god becomes the most himself; his consciousness is forever radically transformed to reveal the true condition: the one through which his energy is ever renewed by its own means. He is attuned to the spirit-energy which runs through all things; thus, he sees them as they truly are. This is the sight by which he does his sublime work.

NOTES ON NIETZSCHE, WAGNER, CAMUS, AND VIVEKANANDA

‘Camus’s excitement here is that he recognizes what Nietzsche understood: in the face of this untenable situation, heroic human effort and creativity were called for. Humans must live and create in this world, amidst great uncertainty and tension, ‘the bow bent to the breaking point’. – William E. Duvall

The relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner is a mutual understanding of the spiritual battle for arrival, emergence, and at last existence which dies in a black winter of the new moon into emergence once more. This is the entirety of history: a history which swallows the human whole like Jonah in the whale of all time and space.

This is the primacy of the metaphysical in both the works of Nietzsche and Wagner – the living among the terrible and the sublime. Bataille’s Heraclitean Meditation aspires to the summit and climes of the two who lived and worked at Tribschen.

The metaphysical struggling in Heraclitus’ cosmic fire is then the forging of the human being in the very flame that is destined to perish him. Camus’ primacy given to the question of suicide is a direct inheritor to this dilemma – a dilemma of disillusionment unto madness – as the old being is stripped entirely of that which it believed it once was and is ushered into its new coat, a coat of stars. This terror of uprooting and being thrust into the chaos of the future is itself the greatest and longest war of history – a war that is ongoing; it is the war of every breath. One becoming conscious of the way of breathing; consciousness coming into breath is the spiritual warrior settling into the human vessel – the one who is ready to mount time and space and ascend to the higher climes of metaphysical struggle.

For the soul requires consciousness and life force in order to meet and do dealings with the spirit – just as a deal might be done in an agora – this bartering between light and shadow and the coming down of new light and life into the flesh is an energetic process which at any moment threatens the very existence of the organism into perishing and disintegration. Just as the violent stars shine, our sun and Sirius, they give and take life in equal measure; in the same breath. So precarious and precious is this human life of instants, and breaths.

‘… the public writer [who] emerges in the eighteenth century, a creature of the social, political, and intellectual ferment that was the Enlightenment… does not simply bear witness to his times… he consciously confronts his times and contests his society.’ – Camus

Camus’ ‘public writer figure’ is Nietzsche par-excellence, the cultural physician who is at work to diagnose the moment which is the socio-cultural condition of ‘man’ at the juncture of history and the coming possibility of the willful creation of ‘new man’, or man who creates himself with the hammer and ground of the fire of spirit which imbues him with drive and life – and the vessel of the divine self which is always himself, which sits in the shade, ready for meeting with the light of willful creation – the conflict of man’s inner self with the force necessary to present itself outright to the outer world – the work of self creation as the expressive uncovering of the whole of man as a work of art into the world as brilliant language. This contest of society is then less about society but the dross and remainder of the world that was, or the existent death, droll, and everyday life which consumes the waking and sleeping hours of mankind – a sort of dream which acts as a ceiling, the consciousness which imbues and inhabits and spells out all of the affairs of man today on the world stage. This contest is first the agon of the spirit, the inner struggle of man to create himself in the flesh; that he is an active engagement in his essence and at his core – one whose very existence is composed of himself – burned away of the old definitions and social

structures which channel and funnel man into predictable pathways and socially useful functions. This man, then, is the anathema of modernity – the one who is at home within; exiled in the world.

To return to Nietzsche, one who has excelled the dross of his time in critique and condemnation of the prison functions of his age and the ages preceding him (; here, conveniently, some ages to come) – Nietzsche’s work cannot be catalogued as merely a work of words or historical function (as Camus says, to call man a historical figure means you can do anything with him) – but as a work of spiritual liberation in the fire of self-trial, of testing the limits of the sheer humanity incarnate as that man we call Nietzsche, where the volumes are mere run-off and monument to that process of inner spiritual transformation. This is to say that Nietzsche’s path, much like Wagner’s music – is of a man inspired to express the inner self; by way of spiritual trial both within and without emerged with a hot iron from his mouth and limbs proclaiming the truth of his soul. It is in this way that we view Nietzsche as Sisyphus victorious; even of course in Nietzsche’s madness and lament we must see him as happy; furthermore, as joyous in that inner work of spiritual liberation.

For with Nietzsche, he rolls the boulder no more and yet rolls it endlessly – it is only the way in which the rolling the boulder is seen that is shifted – a movement from the outer god to the inner divinity which shines through him and is yet possible in all men. Nietzsche is no monk, nor is he an ascetic – as claimed by Camus and others – but he is the one who acts brightly and truly – striking the iron of himself to produce great works – and this is not a masochism but a spiritual working through the vessel of the body into the world of other beings convinced of their bodies, themselves, and their social and political and religious positions in the cosmos called ‘mankind’ today. However, we cannot perhaps say that Nietzsche has reached the understanding that Vivekananda has reached in his cosmological unity – that ‘the world is a great gymnasium where we come to

make ourselves strong’; furthermore, that man’s work does not return when it is truly emergent and he receives nothing in return for it – that it is the work a soul does to at first know itself, then to give the smithed truth back to the world in the form of the purified and purgated sword of knowledge, shining bright with inner light and wisdom – a sword, a statue, a tome. This is how we know both Vivekananda and Nietzsche today, like Rilke’s Apollo – headless and yet still shining majestically from within.

The creative works of both Vivekananda and Nietzsche are shining works of the soul – works which emanate with the passionate power and courage of those who are convicted of the great spiritual powers endowed in all men – powers which have been buried under the rubble of such terms as ‘historical responsibility’. Even today, man lies in the ruins of all that is and once was and many men sit paralyzed, waiting for the next storm tide to wash them off the beaches where the broken artifacts of mankind sit – to wash them out into the unbroken waters where they too will become unbroken in their ceaseless unity. But this is but one movement – the movement of allying oneself with the oneself, the cultivating of the spiritual fire within which burns and animates all things to do their destined work. Man must move like the lightning which animates his mind and limbs to do the great works of service which move his fellow men ever forward to their true destiny – their meeting of themselves; the wholeness of man and his soul incarnate – this is truly what youth is; that which makes living golden. Vivekananda speaks where Nietzsche is still mired in the conflict of his time and place, to say ‘your body is a weapon and consider it very strong. Consider your mind to be very strong as only with a strong mind and body you will be able to cross the ocean of life. Have strong faith in yourself, your body, and your mind’. Each aspect of man has weapons in him yet to be forged by his own hand and remade as weapons against the ignorance which rests his true divinity and the divinity of mankind in the shadows. Nietzsche is forging his liberation as that golden word which speaks through him.

ON NOBILITY

If I am acting as a noble person, I am demanding nothing from no one; knowing full well that this is the full measure that any man or woman can give me. Then, nobility is the lost art that is rarely found except by souls throughout the ages that require nobility and the state of nobility as an art of living amongst tragedy, turmoil, greed, and cunning.

To be living as noble is to conduct the affairs of everyday life in the full awareness that there is nothing to be gained nor lost in the world of men – not from the ownership or possession of another person, goods, land, status, and otherwise. As such, the state of nobility is not, as is often defined, a class position but a way of being in the world.

If I approach the world in a noble fashion, I do so in my own terms and declare myself sovereign over my world; this is to say, I have full influence and sway over the affairs of my life in how I approach them and deal with them. One who is noble always seeks to transcend the situation by introducing a metaphysical system of values which levels the material reality and introduces such spiritual principles as kindness, love, forgiveness; even the pride of one who is aware he and all is god.

To live as a noble person is to live life as a lion – this is to say to rule over oneself like the world and thus take and give to oneself with absolute freedom. Such a person only obeys himself; disdains worldly authority in order to acclaim the tenets of his soul and his soul alone. Such a man bows to nothing and no one but the dictates of wisdom which emerge in his heart’s ear; up through his mouth, eyes, and limbs.

It is to not play around in the muck of the desire of others; the ceaseless striving to achieve worldly primacy and dominion. The noble man understands his relationship to self to be that determining factor of his standing in the world

and throughout the cosmos – a relationship with which he has absolute control and dominion at all times. Such a man never revokes his authority to another, nor does he relinquish the throne of himself to accommodate a ruling or stricture of the world of men.

This is why it is so rare to find noble men today and in all time – that men so often bend and break to the pressures of other men and temptations which lead them astray from the path of their soul’s reason. It is in this fashion that you find so many lost men, so many men consumed with greed and desires with which they do not know nor understand the true root of. These men are dictated to by what they are told to desire; without having dug into the ground of themselves and found a method – these men are the men that you so often find in positions of rulership and control in society at large.

A noble person very often lives a noble life – which is to say, one that is unremarkable, yet entirely constant. Such a man works and lives from the ground of his soul; thus rarely strays far from the kingdom of himself, the throne of a mustard seed and a half an inch. Such a life is not predicated on a use or abuse of the earth or of others, but rather living life as a limb of the earth; a part of the communal life which is also his body and life’s blood.

To be noble is to rule over the kingdom of oneself in acknowledgement that all men and all things are oneself; as such, to rule in the face of temptation with a steady and level hand – a hand which obeys cosmic equity, not the advancement of one before another, nor the fleeting passage of desire, success, empire, status, and acclaim.

Such a noble person comes into his heart and soul’s path simply by his unwavering pursuit of and life adjustment toward the ideal of nobility; by being noble man elevates himself beyond the warring of synthetic dualities into a wholeness which makes him one with his fellow man and the earth which he lives through and lives through him.

The Turning of the Modern Dial: Divine Love in the Boundless Works of Mahmoud Darwish, Vladimir Mayakovsky & Yannis Ritsos

  Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake!
                                              expand!
     I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine.

                                             William Blake

That unifying force binding Mahmoud Darwish, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Yannis Ritsos is the undying love of the poet for the other which is also indelibly and ineffably always already himself. This a priori love, which might be described as divine in its scope and inclusivity (even as Darwish holds his love to violent account) brings the three to the heights of the modern in a tragic sense, which also shares sacred altitude with the sublime sense - to peer over the scaffolding of the great industrial beast of the manmade world (complete with metal and literatures) which has encircled this earth and stars and this time, today - to peer over it and to be pulled in two directions which are also always one: the enduring love of the people who mill about in it, and the enduring love of poetry - which sings like Nietzsche, a birdsong which claims ecstatic and rarified air with the gods, Dionysus, and Prometheus. Each is the source of the other. There could be no birdsong without the bird. Each poet, in his own willing thrust to paper, grapples not only with the core problem (which is always a solute, salutary and medicinal) of his existence as a physis, a humanity which all to often finds itself diametrically opposed to and being pulled apart by the conventions of modern man as a concept and his conceptually informed (and formed as a formulation) world. This is what we call the ‘reality’ of this time; the conflict of this world always is between what one and two believes it must truly be.

What arises in the poetry of these figures who are not only giants of this exploding time but giants to their respective regional-historical traditions is a common willing, a movement into being: a love for the thrum of existence which captivates each human being and yet in this love being Love, it cannot be contained by the social and political mechanisms and ideological principles which govern even today the push and pull between forces convinced of a liberation of the human being (this would be the creation of a human existence) by doctrinal means. It is this poetic love which perpetually escapes the use-value of man’s material grasp that is the human, in and as the love that pulses through the page - this love that John Milton once described as the ‘fift-essence’ which runs through books; this love which admirers and disdainers of Mayakovsky’s work alike (Trotsky and Lenin) ultimately could not reconcile with the dominant modern-Left tenets of their respective places and times. For we see that in each of these poets, the responsibility of a poetic love that abides in a cosmic divinity, an acknowledgement of a love that cannot be detained, dispelled, or permanently named - is that which shines through; truly comes to define, in the endless ruins of history, the times of their writing; displaying the perseverance and possibility of the human spirit emergent into the world of the flesh and text and voice in times of great hardship and turmoil.

II.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.

It would only be fitting to start this essay with the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the lion-hearted poet who sprung Russia from her fitful Tsarist sleep into the chaos of the 20th century. And to say that he sprung her is to say that he abolished everything in his works, as his works and word: ‘"Glorify me," cried Mayakovsky in a poem written in 1914, "For me the great are no match/ Upon everything that has gone before/ I stamp Nihil." Doubtless Mayakovsky's "nihilism," not unlike Bazarov's, should not be confused with cynicism. It is rather a strident repudia-tion of all traditions, all authorities, all established standards (social, ethical, aesthetic), a personal commitment to a Future totally discon- tinuous with the "stifling past,"’ (The Dead Hand, 433). This necessary repudiation is of course the turning away of a great mind from the entirety of that which preceded him (both imagined and historical - and thus the mythological past and future of his time at once) in order to craft the new myth of the present. And so he does: ‘On you, / steeped in love / who watered / the centuries with tears, / I'll turn my back, fixing / the sun like a monocle / into my gaping eye’. In A Cloud in Trousers, Mayakovsky wages the absolute, apocalyptic revolution of values in verse; of course, in doing so, he makes the poetic and the poem the new value - the value which emerges at the end of the necessary bloodshed and conflict detailed therein. He tells us, ‘It's madness / Nothing will remain’ - and yet, the poem tells us this! Even as Mayakovsky lies, sacrosanct, in his national tomb, consecrated by Stalin’s order, the poem remains - more true than any monument or civilizational structure in that it depicts the inner struggle of Mayakovsky’s desire for absolute liberation in a time (as is all time) of political compromise; compromising positions. For the life of the poem in Mayakovsky is complex and multiple, a kaleidoscopic Mayakovsky emerges, the very cosmic figure of the Christ - ‘Paint this day a bright holiday. / O crucifixionlike magic, / do your creation. As you see - / the nails of words / nail me to paper,’ (Bedbug, 131). He imagines himself in the true political situation which he is in

being pulled by his duty to poetry and his duty to the people (which quickly, as we see, becomes his duty to the state) and the ecstatic heights of the spirit which beg unfoldment in and as the poem; the journey of his soul which holds twists and turns in the darkness of his inner compass. So the poem navigates these waters like Odysseus
as a balance of the horizontal and vertical worlds.

One of Mayakovsky’s exalted contemporaries, Osip Mandelstam, had an opinion on the poet: ‘Mayakovsky is working at the elementary and enormous problem of “poetry for everyone, not for the elite.” Of course, the extending of poetry’s base proceeds at the expense of its intensity, its content, its poetic culture. Wonderfully well- informed about the wealth and complexity of world poetry, Mayakovsky, in establishing his “poetry for everyone” has had to turn his back on whatever was incomprehensible, i.e. whatever presupposed in the listener the slightest education in poetry. But to address, in poetry, an audience totally unprepared for poetry is just as ungrateful a job as sitting on a tack. […] But Mayakovsky writes poetry and very cultured poetry: an elegant song-and-dance man whose stanza breaks up into ponderous antitheses, is saturated with hyperbolic metaphors and sustained in monotonous accentual lines. Mayakovsky has absolutely no business impoverishing himself,’ (Lit Hub). As history watches Mayakovsky’s personal tragedy unfold and end at the barrel of a gun, it is hard not to read Mandelstam’s assessment of Mayakovsky’s predicament as that which pulled him to the tensile point and tore his flesh from the world of things. For Mayakovsky, again, the problem of poetry as freedom of the soul did not begin or end at his own poetic workings - rather, the poetry itself became a vehicle of and for revolution - a thrust which had the explosive power of a weapon hitherto unseen by mankind; the sheer thrust of Mayakovsky’s burning heart undifferentiated from life itself: “150,000,000 is the creator of this poem. / It’s rhythms, bullets, it’s rhymes, fires from buildings /150,000,000 speak with my lips. Who can / tell the name of the earth’s creator? Surely a / genius. And so of this my poem no one is the author,” (Ginsberg). He speaks

and invokes his poetry as his own as 150,000,000 revolutionaries, 150,000,000 of his own Russian people which he sees himself as; as such comes into the revolutionary-tragic conundrum of cosmic proportions; like Christ - he lives and dies as that which he is; he does not die so others may live, he dies as they die and he lives as they live - he is ineffably them. What Mandelstam misunderstands about Mayakovsky is that Mayakovsky is not impoverishing himself, or struggling with writing a ‘poetry for everyone’ - it is rather that Mayakovsky is everyone; thus is tasked with writing a poetry which accurately represents the entire condition of nature, the cosmos; the fiery struggle of synthesis which is the two that are one and to explode apart again - the condition of mankind: the mass which are indistinguishable, the history which flows and falls like a torrential downpour; the rain which is composed of each drop which together is the cosmic man - the Christ, the Buddha, the visible god-form woven together in the web of the fates which looks so much like Vishvarupa. Mayakovsky is like a boxer to his time; he challenges each preconceived definition and notion which supposedly defines it; in doing so he wrestles with god in the sense that Pascal defines it in his notebooks: the cultural limit of a period of time; the limit of belief, imagination, knowledge, and understanding in and as representative of the collective consciousness. In abolishing the cultural limit by way of his poetic struggle with self, Mayakovsky stands alone; comes into another Pascalian situation - that Love knows no limit.

It is the problem of Mayakovsky’s identity as creator, creating, and creation which is transcendent; translucent; transference - and this is a problem we see too in Baudelaire’s oeuvre, perhaps the first ‘modern’ poet:

‘In "Le Gâteau," it is the poet who begins the exchange between himself and the children by giving the first child a piece of bread. Thereafter the children fight for it. He does not intervene; he observes the fight, interprets, and draws conclusions. Maria Scott alertly notes the significance of the poet's attitude: "the narrator watches the dispute with as

much detachment as if the boys were two actors fighting on a stage" (88). Being an observer, he does not cross the borders separating the self from the others. However, in very important cases, the text becomes more complex. In "Les Foules," Baudelaire writes: "Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu'il peut à sa guise être lui-même et autrui [The poet possesses this incomparable privilege, namely that he is able at will to be himself and others]." The privilege, however, does not entail a loss of identity: "Le promeneur solitaire et pensif tire une singulière ivresse de cette universelle communion [The solitary and thoughtful stroller (prowler) draws a special kind of intoxication from this universal communion]" (Petits 59). Elsewhere Baudelaire proposes a modern conception of art, or literature, whose aim is to create "une magie suggestive contenant à la fois l'objet et le sujet, le monde extérieur à l'artiste et l'artiste lui-même [an evocative magic containing at the same time the object and the subject, the external world (the world outside the artist) and the artist himself]" ( Oeuvres II: 598). This formula has been advanced by others and no doubt will be advanced in the future as well, but very few have adhered so loy- ally to its inviolable principle,’ (Baudelaire Self).

It is that the fluidity of the self is most present in the poet; that the boundaries of the self and other and the material and spiritual worlds of that which is, was, and will be are thinned; flowing like a river. The poet is the Charonic, the one who traverses and goes to and from the worlds of the living and the dead, dredging up the primordial stuff to return to the world of men like a Prometheus of fire and shadow alike. Mayakovsky, in channeling this force within himself, becomes the definitive poetic figure of his time and place, the power of what Heidegger proclaims: ‘Long is the time because even terror, taken by itself as a ground for turning, is powerless as long as there is no turn with mortal men. But there is a turn with mortals when they find the way to their own nature. That nature lies in this, that mortals reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers. Mortals, when we think of their nature, remain

closer to that absence because they are touched by presence, the ancient name of Being. But because presence conceals itself at the same time, it is itself already absence. Thus the abyss holds and remarks everything,’ (Heidegger What Are Poets For). It is in the touching of the bottom of the philosophical problem which marks modernity; particularly Heidegger’s brief time, that Mayakovsky’s poetry alights and ascends - in that it touches the basin of the soul where life is indistinguishable from itself, where it flows ceaselessly and as fluid - where it is poured out into each lot and figure of being as they dance in Heraclitus’ cosmic fire; a lick of flame, then out, out, brief candle. This is to say that, precisely, Mayakovsky understands in the way that poets understand; he receives the wisdom from his heart which charges him perilously and infinitely forward into the flame, into the fire which alights his time and all time - prepared to do battle with the mythic forces which consume and produce his time, as all time. That he does so unafraid, with love in his heart, is precisely what makes him a poet of the tallest order.

III.

                        When you speak of the suffering,

you feel that you have within yourself the power to create. Just as God created the world, man can create poetry.

                                          Mahmoud Darwish

The difficult work of Darwish, Mayakovsky, and Ritsos is the work of finding one’s centre, or heart-space, from which to write, act, and be. For, of course, it is the beating heart which is the centre of the being, much like the polis, the sun, the seed, or Rome - that pulse which runs life through it. It would not be an over-assertion to say that the works of Darwish, Mayakovsky, and Ritsos stand as foremost cultural memoryworks - or remembrances in that poetic way that they find words for what is happening; thus bring the tragic or

catastrophic or brilliant love to light by way of a seeing of the heart; a witnessing of violence, tragedy, brutality, and beauty with the eyes of the heart. It is in this way that poetry is a sacred sort of history-making, a history that only poets can write in that it requires standing, as Simone Weil says, ‘Statera facta corporis. It is the crucified body which is a true balance, the body reduced to its point in time and space,’. The poetic works of these three act as a witnessing that is also a present-making, a witnessing of both despair and ecstasy; the sublimity of the ‘nothing that lies ahead’ for their people; for their time, while also proving through this very poetry that there is yet inexplicable and great beauty in the chambers of the soul - beauty that will out like a bloom from the soil or a kitten. As Michelet, too, once said, ‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow,’; today, we know the poets to be such beautiful dreamers - capable of calling new seeing, breathing, and being.

In The Cycle of Yannis Ritsos’ Mythological Poems, Chrysa Propaki details the three main levels of Ritsos’ vision of the Greek present: (1) a mythological-historical background, (2) the personal memory ‘the age of the poet’s childhood’; (3) the reflection of contemporary social problems. If one were to examine Botticelli’s Map of Hell, one might find such a similar arrangement - a sediment of time to and through which this very travel of modernity moves. It is as such that Ritsos runs a needle and thread through disparate eras - much in the way that Dante’s work is still so widely read today - Ritsos’ poetry plays through time as a divine orchestration which ultimately transcends the partitioning of time through the understanding of the human themes which run immortal through it: ‘Through allusions to the ten-year Trojan war, the chain of revenges sought by the Atreides family, and the sibling clash between Oedipus’ two children, recent social conflicts in Greece, chiefly in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as contemporary Greece in its entirety come to the surface,’ (Propaki). Much as Mayakovsky fails to see a true division between self and other, Ritsos’ understanding of time propels a modern epic poetry to the fore of consciousness in and as a direct lineage of the great works of

his ancestors. Many of the Ritsos poems could well have been written by Time itself:

The End of Dodona II

With the gods overthrown like that, nobody knew which way to turn. The sick stayed in bed with their eyes closed. Their woolen socks rotted away in their shoes, along with two flowers in a glass. The cunning ones adjusted quickly. They put on their best clothes again, circulated in the marketplace, discussed things, did business. They undertook the defense against the invader. They changed the names of streets and temples: improvised substitutions. Zues and Dione gave way to Jesus and the Virgin. Theodosius added the finishing touches--what altars and sanctuaries, and that huge tree overwhelmed by votive offerings.

And still a number of people (including the best) haven't yet come to their senses. They're waiting once again for better gods and people. They fume, protest, dream, hope. We, the few (who, to some degree anyway, use their heads), we've given up such luxuries, given up thinking itself. We plow our small plot of land, look at clouds once in a while,

calm now, almost secure. One day we found, thrown into a ditch, that statuette that used to strike metal tools with its wand and give out prophetic sounds. For a moment that moved us. We said we'd set it aside for safekeeping somewhere. But what's the point? Are we supposed to cling to relics these days? And what if they dug it up on us? We left it there. Covered it with two handfuls of dirt. The dog was in a hurry. It smelled the trees. Large raindrops were already falling.

One gets this sense, too, in reading Cavafy’s The Horses of Achilles and Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo - the sense of the catastrophic death of the mortal stories of old; the giving way to new time; yet somehow, the old stories still breathe in the dirt, in the air; in the ruins and new city streets; even in the blood of those too young or too old to remember them. Even as the blood of the living. Ritsos’ mythological poems become the breathing bridges of the old stories and the chaos of the birth of the new time in that they are Benjamin’s angels of history - the terrible seeing figures that at once look back at the ruins of the past and run perilously into the abyss of the present-becoming now. It is as such that in the camps (as well as in politics), Ritsos became a leader in that he understood, in that way that poets understand (with wisdom) how the present comes into being as a being itself:

Return

The statues left first. The trees soon after, The people and the animals. The place Was utterly deserted. A wind came. Newspapers

Hurried along the streets, and thorn-twigs. At night the lights came on of their own accord. On his own, a man came back; he looked round. Took out a key, and pressed it to the earth As if passing it to an underground hand Or planting a tree. Afterwards he climbed The marble steps and looked out over the city. One by one, cautiously, the statues returned.

Here, it is impossible to avoid drawing a poetic through-line to Shelley’s Ozymandias; the relic of the crumbling statue as the last remaining thing in the statue at the end of the time of mankind. Of course, the exchange within the poem betrays yet again that theme so prevalent in the aging of Mayakovsky’s works - the poem as witness and bridge to and through the cycles and circles of the birth and death of civilization, individual men; by way of course, the brief candle of mankind itself. In Beckett’s characteristically droll yet profound exposition of Vico, Joyce, and Language, he leaves this tidbit on Vico’s theory regarding poetic spirit:

‘Vico rejected the three popular interpretations of the poetic spirit, which considered poetry as either an ingenious popular expression of philosophical conceptions, or an amusing social diversion, or an exact science within the reach of everyone in possession of the recipe. Poetry, he says, was born of curiosity, daughter of ignorance. The first men had to create matter by the force of their imagination, and ‘poet’ means ‘creator’. Poetry was the first operation of the human mind, and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incapable of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to explain what their reason cannot comprehend. Before articulation [9] comes song; before abstract terms, metaphors. The figurative character of the oldest poetry must be regarded, not as sophisticated confectionery, but as evidence of a poverty-stricken vocabulary and of a disability to achieve abstraction. Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the

disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passion and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when most concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars. Poets are the sense, philosophers; the intelligence of humanity. Considering the Scholastics’ axiom: ‘niente è nell’ intelleto che prima non sia nel senso’, it follows that poetry is a prime condition of philosophy and civilization. The primitive animistic movement was a manifestation of the ‘forma poetica dello spirito,’ (Beckett).

Again, with Vico and Beckett, as Ritsos’ poetry witnesses the atrocities in and of mid century Greece, the very poetic work itself reflects and refracts its origins (as Ritsos and Cavafy are not only poets but historians of and in poetry) to dredge up that very substance which calls all that exists into form and fashion: poetry as the force of imagination which creates and constructs the category of the human and the domains and realms which the human being traverses - from myth to metropolis. Here, we come to a much more expansive definition of poetry and poetics and poesis (one shared by Heidegger), the poetry is the foundational and fundamental activity - not only of all mankind, but of all of Being and Becoming as a process of uncovering, or the emergence of the generative power of life force energy, or the imagination, thrust into existence by way of the Becoming-process. As Walter Benjamin drastically understates in Dream Kitsch, ‘Dreaming has a share in history’. Here, I would wager that dreaming is all of history; furthermore, that this is the fundamental poetic stance and understanding which propels the great works of Dante and Ritsos alike - that the sedimental dreaming of realities throughout and across time and space indelibly forms the world/self conjecture which Mayakovsky understandingly transcends.

IV.

                                       In whose language
                                                     Am I
                                           If not in yours

                                         M. Nourbese Philip

The poetry of Darwish is a love poetry only approached by Rumi, but a love poetry that succeeds Rumi in its political dimensions of self and other brought into the exponentially warring pseudo-oppositions which compose his rapidly accelerating modernity: ‘“Me, or him” / that’s how war starts. But / it ends in an awkward stance: / “Me and him” / “I am she until the end” / that’s how love begins. But / when it ends / it’s an awkward farewell: / “She and I”,’ (Darwish, 154-155). Darwish commands, do not write history as poetry and asks, ‘Was history not born the way we wanted / because the human being never was?’ and we have to answer yes to the philosopher-king who is a king in his handling of poetry; the one who becomes the writer of the history of his people. Like this, Darwish, Ritsos, and Mayakovksy are shepherds of an entire place and time - the ones who find the words to navigate through the peril of the present and into an ever uncertain cusp, lip, or edge of this new moment. Darwish says, ‘the stranger… he is in me, too’; Rimbaud says, ‘the I is another’ and abandons poetry - but he cannot abandon the poetic life which is (as we have discussed above) the entirety of life itself as unfolding conditions as process.

‘In the months preceding his death in August 2008, Mahmoud Darwish composed the poem "A Ready Scenario" in which he depicted an imagined scenario of two enemies who fall together into a hole. The first is the poet, who signifies the Palestinian, and the second is "the enemy." Despite the fact that this latter's identity is not made clear, the reader will not find it difficult to identify him. Through the poem, Darwish explores the possibilities that this

partnership generates: in the metaphorical "hole" itself, and more broadly in the predicament of hostility which it figures. Quickly, a conflict arises over whose right it is to exit first: At the beginning, we wait for luck... Rescuers may find us here And extend the rope of survival to us He says: I first And I say: I first He curses me then I him In vain, The rope has not arrived yet ... (Darwish 2008) However, the question of the priority of exit does not capture the potentiality of this situation because it relies either on external interventions to achieve reconciliation which prove useless or a nihilistic wait for salvation from an unexpected savior. But salvation from outside the hole never arrives, and no one extends the rope of survival. Time passes and enmity remains within their common hole, and so they share the same fate against their will. As enmity deepens, each one is occupied with their own willingness to escape their common entrapment alone, without regard to what the enemy-partner says or does. Darwish concludes his poem with a tragic scene, in which he sums up the impasse in which the "murderer" and the "murdered" have fallen as time passes. Anticipating the poet's prophecy of his own impending death, Darwish requests that another poet complete the scenario: Time has passed us, Our fate is an exception to the rule Here lie a murderer and the murdered, sleeping in one hole And it remains for another poet to take this scenario to its end!,’ (Ghanim)

One will find, here, similarities in Darwish’s scenario to Kafka’s Jackals and Arabs, as well as to Samuel Beckett’s work Waiting for Godot. The absurdity of the political situation of all time sits well and clear here - the very imagined scenario of two enemies fallen into the hole of existence. It could be said that there would be none of these poets without the fundamental misunderstanding and mistaken identities which permeate their times, weaponized and categorically valued differences which necessarily compose the many faces and limbs of Being (Vishvarupa) - and yet are misunderstood by those who have not come (both by way of poetry and philosophy) to the ability of wisdom: seeing the sameness in difference and the difference in sameness; the

eternal in the ephemeral and the Promethean flame of human in the infinite, churning cosmic whole (‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour’ - Blake). However, even in light of Darwish, Ritsos, and Mayakovsky’s works, the problems of misunderstanding remain - precisely because understanding is work that one does oneself.

‘The intensity of the recurrent Palestinian tragedy of dispossession again and again, in nearly identical versions converts the present from the mere passage of time towards a promising future (progress) into a time that is overloaded and overdetermined with its moment (see Benjamin 2003; Moses 2003, 63-82). It is motionless, eternal in its place, and frozen in itself. It has shifted from a horizon that was open to a multitude of possibilities into the suspension of all possibilities?with the exception of the option of calamity and its perpetual repetition. The Palestinian present is occupied with itself and loaded with its moment, as well as with its immediate conse quences, a stubborn tragedy in its continuing reiteration of its particular ver sions of tragedy. In the "hole," the present is not a balcony anymore that surrounds a time-place that is generative of multiple narratives of the past (the paradise of Palestine, the home of lemons and many colors). It is not open to a future of multiple possibilities, to dreams “of new melody” as Darwish once wrote (1988, 181). Rather it is the triumph of the abstract "now" over temporal possibility, and the freezing of the moment on the edge of the tragedy, while waiting for the (un) coming resolution no one knows how or when it will come, or if it will come at all, paralleling Walter Benjamin's messianic moment, in which the dialectic freezes whilst we wait for messianic salvation (2003, 391),’ (Ghanim).

Ghanim’s observation of the contemporary reality of the situation in and about and as Palestine is an observation which is the situation as it stands as composed of people.

This reality is the very abyss which Heidegger gestures to in the above passage - the abyss of this time, now, shrouded in darkness and only illuminated briefly by the lamp light of the poets who pass through the waters of the night on their boats. It continues that Darwish says this: ‘My reader does not authorize me to read myself as I wish, for he forbids himself to read me outside the preconceived image that he has of me. And this attitude is a permanent wound for me. If I write a love poem to a woman, my reader forces himself upon the text and allows himself, as a consequence, to name this woman: Palestine. In my last books, I have very consciously and strenuously controlled myself in order to avoid being read as the reader has been accustomed, and as he wishes. But it was useless because I find myself, once again, prisoner of a political reading. And this discouraged me profoundly. I’m not denying here that one could have a political reading of poetry - Rimbaud himself could be read this way - but this remains one of the levels of the reading and not its essence. Despite all my desire to orient my poem toward the beautiful, it seems that I will be deprived, and for some time, of an innocent reading… I aspire to root my truth in the human and the universal and not in some fixed and limited interpretation,’ (Darwish, 61). We see here the very human problem of mis-apperception which Darwish describes as the political problem manifest again in the way that his poems are being read. For it is this way of seeing which dominates the masses of history and it is this way of seeing which perpetuates the human problem behind which the divine truth of the human being lies, still, for so many - concealed behind the play of light and shadow, images and screens of ideas and concepts which persist in the lack of inquiry into the true origins of the self and world. Without this inquiry there cannot be realization of the interpenetration and playful movement of together and apart which composes the whole, even here in these words. This - especially in regard to Darwish’s works - is a tragedy of interpretation; also being the tragedy of the world conjecture and the fixed identities which emerge in and of it as markers of the boundary between here and there, mine and yours, life and death, man and woman, as definite and

warring opposites in and through which there can be no compromise, or interpenetration. To do this work, which is the work of drawing a border line through the ‘existent’ and the ‘non-existent’, is the work which paints an artificial severance of consciousness from consciousness; a division work which proposes a hierarchical narrative of meaning in accordance with that which is said to exist and to be; to be human - which is then given subjective primacy. Ritsos asks us, what of the so-called dead sediment of history which plays in the fated turn of this moment; Mayakovsky, what of the one that is many and the thread that runs through all men seeking the freedom of now; Darwish, what of the love that bleeds through all things and forms an indistinguishable song that is at once here and nowhere? In asking, they beg us to find our own answers; in asking, they ask us to take an ever-more critical look at the structures and belief-systems which form our own presents.

                                                         ...

  Like all my friends I have tried more than once to lock
myself up within a system in order to preach there at my

ease. But a system is a kind of damnation which forces one to a perpetual recantation; it is always necessary to be inventing a new one, and the drudgery involved is a cruel punishment.

    And my system was always beautiful, spacious, vast,

convenient, neat, and above all, water-tight; at least so it seemed to me. But always a spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality would come to give the lie to my childish and superannuated wisdom— that lamentable child of Utopia! It was no good shifting or stretching my criterion— it always lagged behind universal person, and never stopped chasing after multiform and multi- colored beauty as it moved in the infinite spirals of life. Condemned unremittingly to the humiliation of a new conversion, I took a great decision.

To escape from the horror of these philosophical apostasies, I haughtily resigned myself to modesty; I became content to feel; I returned to seek refuge in impeccable naïveté.

        Charles Baudelaire, for the Exposition Universelle 1855

    – “Everything will perish,/ It will all come down to
  nothing/ And the one who moves life… “…”I stand/
   entwined in fire/ on the inextinguishable bonfire/ of
                                    inconceivable love.”

                                         Vladimir Mayakovsky




                          182

you came down from a blue star, mother, and the seeds of all my lovers buried in the ground somewhere between here and where the pine street barber smokes his daily cigarette on the brick steps, half past noon – and there she is: olivia with her pink hair and the wildflowers streaming down on stuart circle, the gray monument and the student faces - she’s running out in front of me and that’s where i’ll walk, today of all days, with my coat collar around my face, the last of the cherry wine in my stomach and the falling leaves thinking of you, my first love

and how love is a liar.

she is a sweet mouthed woman in the tunnel of dreams - i’ll only drink with her, she and i perched up on a park bench in the garden, always a woman - and the birdsong and the lamp light off the weeping willow. i’ll go back before the revolutions, the mortar shells, the rubble, back before i was born, and recall some purple tipped delirium to try and find her, i’ll call her back, the mustard seed of my soul - my limbs wavering in the new england night air, hailing a cab on castle hill by the lake where we skipped stones with james or some other mystery that remains unsolved - in my head, in my arms, in my breast – a winter memory or some strange glimpse into the future.

maria! i’ll yell, with my head buried in her neck, all red and dangerous - and it’ll be the wrong name. i’ll be back out on the streets again with my fists clenched, shop windows boarded up, watching a riot on the television - maria! i’ll yell, and there will be no one left to hear me. i’ll be in some solitude of myself, watching the deportations on a cell phone screen, looking up at the silver moon and stars and thinking of heine and his song. fools, all - lovers most of all.

maria! i’ll yell - and there’ll be nothing left. the fish market by union station, the mad glimpses of devils and ghosts, slumbering kittens, and the daggers of love which have pierced my heart and driven me to so many madnesses - so many years of madnesses! even my song will be gone – transfigured into cosmic sound.

for now, you can find me in the diner on elden street, falling in love with waitresses and writing everything down on cocktail napkins so i don't lose the moment where everything changes. the doing dishes and waiting and wishing and praying and then suddenly, like lightning - you! the lover! i’ll be ecstatic, showing you the half god of myself, like a lion, the great reason of my birth. i’ll linger in the places where i fell in love, years from now, like a ghost engraved in cobblestones.

we’ll touch, interrupted by war – as we often do. janus' gates thrown wide open and the three heads of the dog of hell about me; the loss of the flesh and i'll look into the crystal ball of the barroom light hung about my face, the mirrors behind her and leave this world forever. maria! i'll call, and she'll be so far away, out of reach by lifeboat or telephone. i'll be here alone, in this apartment reaching wild frequencies and churning a poem in my breast, an uncaged thing without language. not yet, she'll admonish me - athena or her new name today, not yet spoken, not yet emergent from the mouth of this dawning, today, today, and the striking of the dial of time!

for if i have stepped into a new age, bloodshed and catharsis

people weeping in the streets and the flooding overflows of feeling, their mother crowding them together over the barbed wire where infants pass into new country - for if i have stepped into a new age, there is a chance! the human is aleatory: a dice roll; a kiss on the lips from which the unknown murmurs like an earth tremor or a wildfire. life has shown me that there is always a chance for love.

olivia! this poem is for you – and for me too, perhaps. your back turned, and here’s to the truest words, written in silence. only then can i hear the striking of the stars, zeus banging on - his flint and gavel - and the matchstick light beckoning behind your eyes.

THE COSMOLOGY OF VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY

Let me see now, if I can write clearly on Mayakovsky, after several cups of coffee, and clearly articulate precisely this madness at the root of the giant love of his – the love which sutured together the love of the women in his life, particularly Lilya, and the cosmic love which I have attached as an epilogue to one of my recent essays:

– “Everything will perish,/ It will all come down to nothing/ And the one who moves life… “…”I stand/ entwined in fire/ on the inextinguishable bonfire/ of inconceivable love.”

It is Mayakovsky, not Heraclitus, who unites the agape and the personal spheres of love by way of the poem – the Venusian and the Neptunian – rather, here, the poem as a bridge between worlds, dimensions, spheres of representation and dis-representation, where Mayakovsky’s Maria, mother of Christ, moves between the world of his byt (as Ann Charters translates, ‘it means.. ordinary reality, that’s all it means. I mean, that’s all it means, just.. the hardness of things, the grind, the mundane, the trivial, the commonplace. As he says, “love’s boat has crashed against it”’ (Ginsberg)), and the cosmic orientation, perspective, or view of life as a unified whole, which might also be called the movement of the two lovers into one, again, entwined in fire.

Charters goes on; it is important to hear the words of the Mayakovsky scholar clearly and completely on this topic: ‘Byt, yes. That’s right, against everything that is commonplace, that we couldn’t.. our love was unable to rise above and (this is a very important word. I think it’s the word that Mayakovsky uses most of all. He found this existence incredibly boring and difficult and he really wanted to live on an elevated plane. He felt that the second revolution of 1917 was only the second of at least three and he was heartbroken that the third revolution had not

happened. He thought that the Revolution in 1917, the second one, the successful one, the political revolution, had a.. in government, to be fair, but he looked for the third revolution (he called it “the revolution of the spirit” and he kept waiting for it to happen and felt that his job was to help to bring it about, and that this revolution was, in his own experience, forever defeated by byt – B-Y-T “the experience of the mundane, commonplace, running a government, bureaucracy (amazing isn't it)..."

We begin and end here with the works of Mayakovsky, one who expressed this bridge of and through the personal and the cosmic in his poetry as a way of seeing and being as the world (take the opening lines of 150,000,000 as an example: ‘150,000,000 is the creator of this poem. / It’s rhythms, bullets, it’s rhymes, fires from buildings /150,000,000 speak with my lips. Who can / tell the name of the earth’s creator? Surely a / genius. And so of this my poem no one is the author,’) and uses this way of seeing and being as the world as, inextricably (as politics) his revolutionary programme – one which far exceeds the materialisms of Trotsky and Lenin, both of whom were quite familiar with Mayakovsky in his time and held differing (yet both diminuitive) opinions of the poet, whose love outshone that which their revolutionary programmes were able and willing to offer in their specificity and endless commitment to class struggle.

Here is the difficulty of Mayakovsky’s position as the one who charges headlong into the fray of modernity with the strength and courage of a lion, summoning the entirety of himself (and here I mean Mayakovsky as all things, all life; cosmic man; Mayakovsky as no one (who is the author of his poem), Mayakovsky as the one (who moves life) – Mayakovsky as Krishna in visible form – he recognizes this divine spiritual truth of being incarnate as a human being and he realizes this spiritual truth of being through his expressed language throughout his oeuvre, a spiritual truth which finds itself increasingly at odds with a transitional power (between the Tsarist rule of pre-1917 and the coalescing revolutionary powers which move through Lenin and Trotsky into Stalin’s

Soviet ‘Union’ by mid-century) – Mayakovsky is a political figure if only that he attempts to translate, in a materialist sense, his political values which can only be described as love that both transcends (as the highest order) the byt of politics and yet in its transcendence imbues politics, the world of the byt, everywhere with its subtle essence as that which composes all things. It is in this way that Mayakovsky composes a metaphysics of love which remarks upon, in and through the physis primarily by way of the personal – the love poems which Mayakovsky wrote to and with his intimacies; these poems as bridges of fire in relationship.

It is these love relationships that incite and excite Mayakovsky’s lion heart to form; spring his strength into figuration – which is to say, the sculptor of language into the form of the poem, streaming lines of blood-emboldened energy. For it is rare if not impossible to find lines of inspir(it)ed poetry written with such bare urgency as in Mayakovsky’s I Love cycle. Here, from Adulthood:

Night. You wear your best dress. You rest your soul with wives, with widows. I gasped in Moscow’s embraces, choked in the ring of endless Sadovaya Road. Into hearts, into wee hours mistresses tick. Ecstatic partners on the bed of love. I caught The wild heartbeat of capitals, lying around like Passion Square. Unbuttoned— my heart nearly outside— I open myself to sun and to puddle. Enter with your passions! Climb in with your loves! From now on I have no power over my heart. I know where the heart lives in others.

It is in the breast—as everyone knows! But in me though anatomy went mad. An all-encompassing heart— booms everywhere. Oh, how many of them, how many springtimes, have in twenty years poured into me, inflamed! Their burden unspent is just unbearable. Unbearable not as in verse, but literally.

Particularly, after Mayakovsky sets the scene of the specific, one gets the sense here of a flower bursting open into bloom, a bomb, a child being born, or some massive fertility event which here Mayakovsky remarks as ‘how many of them… springtimes’ – which we might also call revolutions as outpourings of cosmic energy, life force energy in the erotic sense. Mayakovsky himself ‘opens’ himself to sun and puddle, opens the vessel of his intimate being to the inflow and outflow of this changing cosmic energy which we today call the seasons, the cycles of birth and death, and other such revolutions and turnings of the wheel. He does not merely see, but feels this brewing, churning inside him – revolutions which do not just beg or plead, but demand expression unto his bursting, unto his explosion of self: as at one with the universal laws. ‘Their burden unspent is just unbearable’; here, Mayakovsky breaks the rules of the poem – and must assert himself even beyond the expressive potential of the poem as a litera(l)ary form or device – but as a boombox, a microphone, or a music expressed by the musical form of Mayakovsky’s body struggling for release, or absolute expression. You get the formal equivalent of a scream at the end of this poem, or a movement from the physical landscape of Moscow’s sphere of the social, into the gasping breath of Mayakovsky (explicitly eroticized in the following lines) and the birth of an ‘all-encompassing heart’ which is now the only way we can refer to Mayakovsky, as he makes explicit this changing-of-self in a madness of

anatomy which we also experience in Artaud. The reader is slammed with the world heart, the word heart, overpowering the poem and it seems as though every other line the heart is elucidated and called out like a beat, a ticking, a time. It, as the poem, again, booms everywhere. The analysis of the poem falls short, as it must, falls short – in the light of ‘inconceivable love’. What does this mean, then, for Mayakovsky the poet and the revolutionary? One who must, surely, if not for himself then for the burgeoning new Russia – conceive?

It means a retreat to the doorstep of Maria to experience and feel this love intimately, the touch of the flesh, the appearance of the divine in the ordinary, the bridge between byt and the cosmic – the bridge which is the lovers entwined in the cosmic fire of their love – the force which is the light of physis (by course of force, by force of course!); Mayakovsky’s call to Maria, his song for her, to her, with her – to become joined with him. It is, again, important to recognize the interdimensional fluidity and significance of the name Maria, particularly in Mayakovsky’s time. Charters refers to Maria as both a particular lover of Mayakovsky’s and the mother of Christ. Here, we must return to Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers:

And I feel- “I” Is too small to fit me. Someone inside me is getting smothered…

Maria! Maria! Let me in, Maria! Don’t leave me out on the street! You can’t? My cheeks cave in, But you wait ruthlessly. Soon, sampled by everyone, Stale and pallid, I’ll come out And mumble toothlessly

That today I’m “Remarkably candid.”

Maria, You see– My shoulders are drooping again.

In the streets, the men Prick the fat in their four-story craws. They show their eyes, Worn out in the forty years of despair, and restless- They snicker because In my teeth, Again, I hold the hardened crust of last night’s caresses…

(There simply is not room here to include the entire poem.)

Maria, closer!

Whether naked and shameless, Or shivering in dismay, Yield the wonder of your lips, so gentle: My heart and I have never lived until May, But in my past, A hundreds of Aprils assembled.

Maria! A poet sings praises to Tiana all day, But I– I’m made of flesh, I’m a man, — I ask for your body, Like the Christians pray: “Give us this day Our daily bread.”

Maria, give it to me!

Maria! I fear to forget your name As a poet fears to forget under pressure A word He conceived in a restless night, Equal to God in effect.

Your body I shall continue to love and treasure As a soldier Amputated by war, Alone And unwanted, Cherishes his remaining leg.

Maria, — You won’t have me? You won’t!

Ha!

Then gloomy and dismal, Once more, I shall carry My tear-stained heart Forward, Like a dog, Limping, Carries the paw That the speeding train had ran over.

With the blood from the heart I cheer the road that I roam, Flowers cling to my jacket, making it dusty, The sun will dance a thousand times round the earth, Like Salome Danced around the head of the Baptist.

And when my years, at their very end, Will finish their dance and wrinkle,

A million bloodstains will spread The path to my Father’s kingdom.

For Mayakovsky, Maria’s love is the love of the divine feminine, of for and with the feminine which composes him and the beloved – Maria who is at once:

Charters: Privately, he was wooing a girl when he was in Odessa, when he was off the stage, called Maria, who turned him down…

Charters: As I said the “Cloud in Trousers” was (a) poem to the other loves, the earlier ones, the Marias in his life. Marie also was not the name of the girl but the poem in its attack had attacked religion, obviously to take Maria, the name of Christ’s mother, as the central sexual figure in the poem…

And the very force of that which births all things from no things, or the Becoming-passage to and through which Being endlessly finds its form as beings of itself. This cosmic synthesis is beaten half to death by Mayakovsky in his use of Christian symbolism to seal the time of Paradise Lost into the creation of paradise on earth (We’ll bring all the Eves back into Eden); the situation of himself not as a Christian, rather, but as Christ-approximate: ‘Jesus, Himself, may be sniffing / The forget-me-nots of my soul’. Again, here, Mayakovsky’s soul is a flower in bloom – a flower from the soil of his intimate self into and through the world of the collective physis, or ever-changing body. It is Maria’s body, the body of the feminine both divine and physis, that Mayakovsky values above all else – including the aesthetics of the poem. The poem is of course to her, about his waiting for her, and his call is directly through her, a song which runs through him. It is incredibly difficult to elucidate this process, as, again, it is (as Mayakovsky calls) love, inconceivable. Here, by inconceivable, we understand Maria’s rejection (as it must be by not ever truly being, as in death, perfection), and the need for poetry to become the bridge from byt to infinite; to elucidate the caress of lovers

and the entwinement perhaps incompletely – as are the lovers, themselves, but for a moment, intercoursed.

The ‘hardened crust of last night’s caresses’ is the poem itself, the scraps of bread from the leavened loaf which is the rising of love, the experience of the erotic in real time; the poem itself which is another event, another meal, perhaps ‘leftovers’ if you will, of the inconceivable, irreducible wholeness. It is the poem itself which holds the scraps of the divinity brought into byt, the seductive glow emanent from the torso of Apollo in Rilke’s poem of the same name. It is this love too that, again, runs through Mayakovsky as what can only be called inspiration; it may very well be said that Mayakovsky lives and breathes for love; an outsized love which he describes repeatedly himself in the above lines which does not begin or end at any one person or point – nonetheless that which we might conventionally call ‘Mayakovsky himself’. Thus, we have to return to Charters’ comments on Mayakovsky and byt:

Student: Was he also a political revolutionary? a spiritual.. Ann Charters: It’s beyond politics. AG: Well, they’ve already had the Russian Revolution Student: The first two revolutionary attempts are both political? Ann Charters: Political, yeah – and the second one suceeded. Student: And the second one suceeded, right, and the third one.. spiritual? Ann Charters: ..is to come

In light of Charters’ comments noted throughout these pages, we have to come to see Mayakovsky as not merely a warrior for his own means or pleasure (the poet of Venusian love), or a warrior for the liberation of the Russian people (the poet of the revolutionary upheaval of the material). We must come into further understanding of the underlying themes of Mayakovsky’s work as a foremost poet of the spirit; Mayakovsky as a spiritual warrior perhaps akin to Nietzsche in his vision for a total transvaluation of values:

Glorify me! For me the great are no match. Upon every achievement I stamp nihil

I never want to read anything. Books? What are books!

A transvaluation of values which radically interprets, primarily, without doubling back or reforming (-re) the way in which the self exists, is formulated, and is understood as a cosmology. It is no mistake that A Cloud in Trousers and Mayakovsky’s last poem both end in remarks upon the cosmic:

I thought that you were the Great God, Almighty But you’re a miniature idol, — a dunce in a suit, Bending over, I’m already reaching For the knife that I’m hiding At the top of my boot. You, swindlers with wings, Huddle in fright! Ruffle your shuddering feathers, rascals! You, reeking of incense, I’ll open you wide, From here all the way to Alaska. Let me go! You can’t stop me! Whether I’m right or wrong Makes no difference, I will not be calmer. Look, — The stars were beheaded all night long And the sky is again bloody with slaughter. Hey you, Heaven! Take your hat off, When you see me near! Silence.

The universe sleeps. Placing its paw Under the black, star-infested ear.

It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep. The Milky Way streams silver, an Oka through the night. I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you Or bother you with lightning telegrams. Like they say, the incident is closed. Love's little boat has crashed on daily life. We're even, you and I. No need to account For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs. Look: How quiet the world is. Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars. At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak To history, eternity, and all creation.

We see quite clearly here that the problem of Mayakovsky himself is resolved in the cosmic – which is to say, the problem of the I (in Mayakovsky’s perspective) is resolved in the cosmic. It is by way of this perspectival bridge in and as the form of the lovers entwined in fire that we come into such statements as made in his 150,000,000 and A Cloud in Trousers; without this understanding of the cosmological underpinnings which inform the life and love of Vladimir Mayakovsky, we cannot possibly begin to hope to understand his poetry. Furthermore, we cannot begin to hope to understand the struggle undergone by the poet, Jacob wrestling with God til the break of day – to bring together this cosmological framework of seeing and being into the world of the byt, a world fraught with dualisms, and separations informed by a lack of love – which is to say a lack of cosmic love. Here, we lose Mayakovsky the merely literary figure or merely materia-political revolutionary; come into an understanding of Mayakovsky the mystic; the weight of the undertaking which he describes as being on his body, weighing on his incarnation – an undertaking which can only be described as, again, Christ-like, or Buddhic in

its scope and necessity of life. For what Mayakovsky describes in his works is not merely an undertaking of poetic image making or craft – but a way of being and seeing in the world which takes into account the booming heart which runs through all things; the agape struggle which comes with living in Jerusalem – the seat of the soul – in a world which has not quite caught on yet. This is what it means to be a poet in the order of Mayakovsky; when we sit down to read Mayakovsky and return to his works on days of being defeated by byt, it is still possible to hear the heart of the lion’s roar running through it.

A thousand little useless loves That did not touch the divine A thousand little Byt - Or where the lifeboat has crashed, On the hard rocks of our time - Stone walls of government, chain link fences of land.

A thousand little useless loves, Cradled in the kitchen, stoked against the stove - Born from mother’s black; Spun into this world upon a darkened path.

They raised my lover into the world And put her up against curriculums, books, and knowledge Wetting the coal fire of her soul; Soaking it with poisoned rain.

So now today I walk with my bag about my back, A wayfarer, away from the chambers of the king, Outside his high walls, away from the gaze of other men. Today I walk these woods, this forest of my heart Where I blaze a path with the absolute rule of the word, The realized god Who leaps out of my mouth Like a jungle cat.

For today there are loves that come and go far quicker than the seasons, She is in my bed and faded like an apparition, Quicker than the coffee going cold - I leap up to get my pen and she is gone, And leaving no postmark for her return, No postmark where I can reach her.

Tonight in this city which crumbles about me, I will reach for the paper - burning now in the fire And summon the ecstasy, her hair thrown back into the abyss

And the water which rushes from the black well, like a brook Out into this open world. Tonight, She will take her truest form.

I must awake! And do away with these garments of man, These superfluous struggles which leave me bleary eyed Towing the city streets, the angler fish poet – Down in the deeps, begging, where the sun no longer inquires. He fixes his glass upon me and commands, Up with you! From your terrible slumber – Up with you! Into the heat of these lovers’ dreams. Up with you and into their hearts.

For each woman that has turned away from me, The poet, the liar, the beggar, the king, All of my lionhearted roars reduced to the bedroom, alone, Listening to the radiator hymnal – For each woman who has turned her back, All full moons of our love reduced to darkened slivers, Then the abyssal blackness of total night. For each woman that has turned away from me, This poem is for you.

I love the moon; thus I go this way Bedraggled, the bed head of ten years swathed, My brow, my lips quivering – This body an arrow shot from the moonlight into the crossroads square. There, I linger at the fount in your name, darling Athene – There, I linger in your name and your name alone – With my calloused hands out holding nothing, With your baptism in my mouth.

Today I am so terribly stripped of your love, So terribly stripped in that terrible slumber that leaves my stomach hollow with no hunger – So terribly stripped that I cannot move. How I have chased all your daughters and ended up as nothing – the water of their divinity through my fingertips, The ecstasy of their mouths through my mind Like wind. Today I hear them howl, marvelous choir All of the sirens that are myself,

All of the wondrous temptations who have crept up to my breast and brow from sea and stone – Perched upon my mattress, weighing my chest in sleepless nights, Where darkness folds itself into my soul like a slip of paper.

In this silence alone, I write Betrayed of myself, Judas to my soul – Prisoner, alone, to the wildness of my heart. How it is swayed by the world – each new lover and her eyes upon me, her desire upon me – And how I fall into the reveries of the rising and falling Of her breath.

You’re her mother, Athene – Tall and strong and casting your right arm over her shoulder, The same shadow I feel looming, you, stormcloud, You, mother, whose call I have lost in wild nights where I am knocking at the doorstep of a new lover – in the park with her hand on my bare leg, the wildflowers, and the promise of some rescue from this barrenness. You’re her mother, Athene – The great warrior who has knocked the desert aside to reveal an oasis. How blue and endless, I’ll look down into the pool – to reach down and bathe myself in the clear waters – Only to be met at last with the glass of my reflection. Only to be met at last with the being cast out, Looking up, And the glimpse of her stony balcony.

I have razed this city with my love – I have burned her to the ground with memories of touch, of brief dances, Of sweat and the friction which erases me completely. Oh terrible passion – For all the love of god this passion that has bit me like a snake on the ankles, entwined me with fire – Run me to the edge of existence into the black.

I’ll sit on your kitchen counter, drinking vodka, staring with my open lids into the camera – I’ll sit on the tar roof, smoking, feverish I’ll live a thousand lives in the seat of your love.

For this desperation has run me aground On the jagged rocks of yet another Crete, another Troy, The promise of another twenty years of what! This? This insatiable hunger, this empty fire in my stomach which leads me to roll boulders and find the morning in confusion? This body bruised and exhausted and so far away from your embrace, Athene, goddess of the exhalation? When will I breathe out at last? When will I be free from this prison of language?

Today, when I write, I will not talk about secrets, The direction of man, my convictions, my philosophy. Today I will write about the desperation of love, The madness for unity; the two becoming one. I see you chasing me to my grave, Horses of Achilles, I see you mourning my fallen brothers. Shed your tears here! Weep them here! For a rose will grow in the barren land – and perhaps there will be another kiss for us all in the midst of this terrible night. Roll the dice with me! Half god, half man, you, reading these words as they tumble out of me like wretched figures – Roll the dice with me and commence in the music of our time – as it runs to the closing of this act. There will be revelries in other brick alleyway buildings, Men who have forgotten history or remembered it too well (what’s the difference?) And drink themselves into oblivion and recall the ecstasy of the ancient songs. Even today, their drumbeat remains – the ruptures of the blood against the skin and the spilling over – The hands, the fists, and the bullet wounds.

Today, when I write, the cosmic dance overwhelms me –

The catharsis which gouged the eyes of Oedipus and struck Tiresias blind – all of these visions of men which become war and violent copulation – all sacrifice and judgement. Today, all stand trial in the kangaroo court of mankind – A court of raging desires which overwhelms the land like a wildfire.

For I am nothing but another man In the midst of men. All of these carefully chosen words amount only to an attempt to translate your word, Athene, your word which withholds itself in the infinity of breath – That sliver of air that I capture with this vessel of the body and press through my fingers, Leaving a mark of stone, a line of red, a gesture recalling the dance of stars across your black womb. For I am nothing but another man Desirous of love! What could save me now but the embrace of the lover – The true embrace of being understood and engulfed, Swallowed in the intercourse Of being.

HECATE

O Goddess – Draw near at the closing of the day. Draw near now to your unborn son – Your cast out, heathen son, Your black.

O Goddess – Draw your sword and cleave me from this reality. O Goddess – how the darkness grows. I sit now Beneath the tree of all things Calling for your wisdom.

Reveal to me what lies beneath the stormclouds, The raging skies, drops of rain; The fever that runs high in my blood. Reveal to me the energy Latent in your eclipse.

Draw near to me, O Goddess! Draw ever near. Hang my flesh; Drag my corpse down into your chambers And take from me what you will – So that I might be utterly transfigured In the shape of your name.

O Goddess! Accept that I am but human. And that these faults and flaws of my song are but one aspect of my tribute to you, my other half, you, the salve to My Incompletion. Let me lay these songs in tribute to you, O Goddess of the boundary – My immortal pair.

All time, all body, all meaning – Laid in waste before you.

All kingdoms, all gardens, Flowered and fallen before your feet. You who hold the moon with many arms; You who hold illumination and blackness to your breast.

Let me burn on your pyre tonight; Take my breath So it may be fit To form the shape of your name.

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