It’s a mystery to me where all this
pollen comes from, but our Subaru - paprika red
- was coated in a thick beige
layer of the stuff. We decided to swing by the Brown Bear Car Wash at the
bottom of Queen Anne Hill over on the west side, facing the Olympics and Puget
Sound and the maze of railroad tracks at Interbay, on our way to the library to
pick up some movies (The Silence of Mark
Rothko and Oregon’s Crater Lake
National Park). I also had a copy of Michael McClure’s Mephistos waiting for pick up. So after the sudsy slish slosh of
those octopal fronds dancing over our windshield as Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta
Love” poured out of our speakers, we stopped at the library, got our movies and
book and came home.
Mephistos:
curious title. The word makes me think of firecrackers. And Goethe and Faust
and Promethean rebellions of philosophy and science. Amorous flute-playing Pans
with double sex and gently moving thighs.
Also, laundry. Did I
mention folding clothes? I folded clothes. Then I laid back and opened Mephistos.
And within minutes I was
in that wonderfully exquisite state of awareness induced by McClure's work, that keen
sense of proprioception put forward so vigorously and insistently by Charles
Olson, the body itself, its tendons, muscles, joints, its elbows and wrists,
its pulse and eyebrows and bones and containment in skin, this walking talking
constellation of mitochondria “in which the organs are slung,” “the body of us
as object which spontaneously or of its
own order produces experience,” “SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM / BY MOVEMENT
OF ITS OWN TISSUES.”
You get the idea. And
believe me, at my age, the body matters. Did it ever stop mattering? Sure, back
in the day when I routinely binged on alcohol and launched myself into Dionysian
odysseys that ended at Denny’s at five in the morning. I had youth, the sweet
luxury of youth. As one comic recently expressed it, when I was in my twenties I
could stab myself with a knife twenty-seven times and then stand in the mirror
and watch it all heal. Yes, I can dig it. I can see that happening. They body
is so forgiving in your twenties. So supple, so resilient. It would be a
stretch to say that it didn’t matter, of course it mattered, I wasn’t that
cavalier. Let’s just say I was on the road of excess and had a long way to go
before I reached the palace of wisdom.
I recovered easily from
the ecstasies and abuses of my Bacchanalian romps all the way into my mid-30s,
but increasingly, with age, that ceased to be the case. Nursing monster
hangovers while trying to focus on stupid musicals like Hello Dolly eventually shifted my mind toward a greater
appreciation of all things corporeal. My body in particular, this garment of
skin and bone I walk around in. It’s not a toy. It’s not a machine. It’s a
galaxy of cells, a fragile community of eukaryotes and organelles. You (whoever
‘you’ turns out to be) are in the wheelhouse, watching out for shoals and
rubber tires. Don’t sink, don’t break, don’t get dead. That’s your job.
These days, old and sober
and a whole lot wiser, whenever I stand for minutes on end staring at Duchamp’s
Nude Descending A Staircase waiting
for a flow of urine, I become acutely aware of my body’s infirmities and
strengths. Age gets your attention. It insists you pay attention. Things break
easily. Other things toughen. It’s an amazing process.
When it comes to biology,
there is no greater poet than Michael McClure. He IS biology. His poems get up
and walk around and flop to the ground with their arms splayed out. He is the
slippery cold of beach wrack in the hand, the tentacles of a squid spreading
out like the rays of a chrysanthemum as he jets toward a school of krill in the
Sea of Cortez. It's amazing how alive his poetry can make me feel. And he's a
really old guy now. Eighty fucking five.
Do you like paradox? I
do. Here’s a great paradox: as you get older you get younger. You do. How does
that happen, you might wonder. It happens naturally, instinctively, viscerally.
You grow out of experience. Experience gets refined, distilled, concentrated.
And as experience deepens, it becomes powerfully generative. The end result is
élan. Élan vital is Henri Bergson’s term for the spontaneous morphogenesis of an emergent system in an
increasingly complex manner. Morphogenesis means, literally, “beginning of the
shape.” As we age, our shape increasingly assumes the imago of our spirit. The
fuller reality of our being comes through more urgently, more emphatically,
inspired by griefs and losses and occasional joys, the ephemera of our
pilgrimage on this plane. It wants out. It hungers for elsewhere. And that
makes it dangerous. A little touch of Mephisto in the night.
It takes a lifetime to reach the genius and purity of
childhood.
“Emily Dickinson writes that Mephistopheles would be the
best friend if he had fidelity,” McClure comments in his forward. “If so, he
would then be thoroughly divine.”
McClure also reveals in his forward that
the thirty-seven strophes of Mephistos
“resemble a medicine bundle. American Indians gathered spirit objects to make
medicine bundles that they carried along, whether in the heart or in a pouch.
One bundle I have seen is wrapped in a green-dyed otter skin.”
A medicine bundle can contain anything of significance
for the person who puts it together, seeds, feathers, rocks, horse hair, pine
cones, animal teeth, bones or particles of bone. The traditional material of
the bag itself is “brain tanned buckskin.” Brain-tanned refers to the use of
animal brain and water to create an emulsified solution. Brain matter contains
lecithin, which is a natural tanning agent.
I like the spin Spinoza put on matters relating to the
divine, particularly the notion that there is one existing substance, God, but
infinitely many modes. That’s helpful. Because when a tornado blasts across the
countryside tearing up people’s homes and hurling cars at telephone poles, you’ve
got to wonder what the divine spirit had up his sleeve that particular day.
War is man-made, that evil is easy to explain. There are
a lot of assholes out there. You’re not going to find much divinity on Wall
Street or in the boardrooms of the oil companies. The divine might be
all-pervasive, but why isn’t it pervading those guys? Maybe it is, but they’re
not feeling it. Not honoring it. The behavior of these people is anathema to
me, an enigma, but who am I to make these kinds of judgements?
Shit I don’t know. I’m getting lost here.
It’s a thorny subject. How do you make a case for the
divine in a world facing mass extinction? In which people crossing a bridge or
standing in line at an airport are suddenly run over by a truck or stabbed or blown
to bits? In which thousands of men and women die in the Mediterranean each year
migrating to Europe because of the violence and despair in their home
countries? In which the elderly and maimed and handicapped cannot afford
healthcare in the richest country in the world? How has life on this planet
become so tormented and oppressed? What is evil? Does evil exist in nature, or
is it strictly a product of humankind? Does it coexist with the divine? Is
there truly a Divine Being or Energy holding this universe together that is so
much vaster and sublime than anything I can imagine that what appears to be
evil is fundamentally insignificant because it is we who are self-aware that
give meaning to these things? I don’t know, I truly don’t. But I know it’s
there. The sublime, the divine, the sacred. I can feel it. When I read poets
like Michael McClure my eyes and ears open. Ironic, that in this instance he
invokes a trickster-deity like Mephistopheles.
Mephistopheles, McClure attests elsewhere in his instructive forward, “is an
angel who helps God in constructing the universe and in the creation of orcas
and giant sea mammals.”
In the Judeo-Christian religions God is a supreme
authority. Society invokes God to enforce civility and good behavior. Ergo, the
dark side provides an avenue of rebellion. The dark side prevents the social
order from becoming overly oppressive. It recognizes impulses that do not seem
consistent with the edicts of the Supreme Being. The dark side recognizes the
impulses of raw, undomesticated Being, however wild or savage this energy
happens to express itself. William Blake argued that it was religion and the
enforcement of laws contrary to the natural impulses of Being that are the
ultimate evil.
“Without contraries is no progression,” declaims Blake in
his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In
a passage titled “The Voice of the Devil,” he has this to say:
All Bibles or sacred
codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1.
That
Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body. &
that reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his
Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld
Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul
in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason
is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3.
Energy
is Eternal Delight.
As for the Divine, there are as many conceptions of it as
there are people. Some people find it in religion, others in a shot of bourbon.
Some people find it in psilocybin or peyote, others in a hard oak pew in a Lutheran
or Presbyterian church. Some people kneel and face east at a certain time of
day and say prayers to it. Others attempt to reach the Divine by spinning in
circles. Some chant, some sing. Some climb to the peaks of mountains. Some sit
and dissolve into nothingness.
Here’s what I think it is: a force. A numen. A divine
presence. The combined dynamism (according to Cicero) of a divine mind (divina mens) and a divine power (vim
divinam) “which pervades the lives of
men.” McClure’s word for it is “meatspirit.” It is “the odor of the fat pink
rose / pressed to the face / before / the burial / of ashes.” It is remarkably
evident in the life of a calico cat staring “…upward into morning / Every
moment and whisker / is startled / into / totality of her being / EVERYWHERE.”
McClure's observations
and most importantly his feelings about the universe are uncannily explicit,
palpable in their expression. A reading of one or two poems brings you deeper
into a sense of being, an exquisite immediacy to everything in you and above
you and around you that is so sudden in its effect it's almost startling. I
mean, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but something is going on in this work
that borders the supernatural. And by supernatural I don't mean witches and
ghosts and flying monkeys, I mean that Promethean sense of boundless perception
Shelley hinted at in his great poem "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." An
unseen power given tangible specifics in wet black rocks and Kenyan cow shit,
the ding an sich of blackberries.
AND THAT’S THE TOP
LAYER
of the interweaving
of matters
and non-matters
BURIED IN
CONSCIOUSNESS
way down in the star
banks
that hang like mud at
the edge of a puddle
for the lengthening
red and brown
earthworm under the
forest of gold-sided ferns
Like that.
That is it.
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