Unsaying Un Say: Two Essays

UnSaying Un Say: Two Essays

It begins with this: soul is the death inside you.
1 Soul lodges itself, a hard burl of dark knowledge
that like the pomegranate seed Persephone swallowed
will not disintegrate or split with a white tendrilled
desire for green light, but stays as Peter’s rock
unassailably planted core-deep, the cornerstone of
your temple to your own salvation, the cenotaph of
your time spent, spinning, weaving the riches that
spring from the turning seasons of your sorrows and
joys. It begins in the rich invisible of the refused,
of that which will not be joined in light or in the
uniqueness of a time or place. It begins in the
intractable faceless maws of eternity, the great
spaceless, measureless, seedless womb that nonetheless
churns and grinds out stars and lives and desires
and fierce daemons hungry for the fires of a beauty
enfleshed in a perpetual claim of temporal consequence.
It all happens at once. The seeding threshing harvest
harrowing rotting tendrils reaching, the fruit the
wine the drunkenness sobriety regrets and avowals,
the birth death resurrection and annihilation.

The devil gouges his own ribs, pulls from his side
the fire in the desert, the winds of howling sorrow
that would take the eternity from a grain of sand
and swallow it in a dog’s empty eye. We hate our own
unfolding; our child who cries in the night, cries
until there is no voice but the grit of raw strings
upon a honing stone.

Or to stick to the image. The why the end of things
the snake with its head for a tail a tale on its head
the balance of a beautiful girl with the lid of it
upon her Solomon Song neck burnished gold of a
shoulders and ebony skin lips like savage cherries
like the doors of a rounded heaven the mansions
of Theresa.

Speak clearly then. The soul is a photographer.
You are its film.

Overexposed underexposed stripped undeveloped dipped
in silver and gold and subjected to pinholes and acid
baths and long hours in the dark dreaming of what may
come out in the wash.

Put a lid on it.

Loops and canisters and melting into dust. Pornographic
stills, exploitative newsreels. The kiss. Remember
Andy Warhol. Remember the Western Lands. The Egyptians
and the final battle in the streets of Berlin,
a monster in the labyrinth, who has the string theory
to pull this out. Odysseus has returned again and
Penelope snips the final thread. The tapestry features
the three graces with hounds leaping as doves scatter
and in the distance Daedalus weeps by the relentless sea.

Pay attention to the images, to the emptiness between
the lines. The sorrow of what is undone night after
night. The obsessive compulsive nature of a host to
party night after night and never put at end to it.
O the slaughter of the unfulfilled guests. How
ghosts fill up the caves with fleshless laments
and the Queen of Troy still dreams of fires that
will not be quenched.

The baskets on the heads of the women as they
walk along the Nile. The baby drifting down the river,
the prince with one eye. The old man making bricks
and cobbling shoes, imagining the straw as bending
green upon their naked thighs.

Essay the price of clear water. Of the colors pouring
up into your fascinated face. The drunken boats and
willow barks, the lithe spirits and Alice with her
teapot logic whistling like a punctured moon.

Who gathers these sea glass tokens. Place them on
the eyes of brides and wrap them round the loins
of grooms. The glistening sea salt has satisfied
the king’s deer and the queen has gathered her boughs
of stars to her bosom. The music begins when you
open any door.

These images strike out of every glinting mote
in the eye of sorrow. But so in the shadow a joy.
Remember Eleusis. How the secret must be kept.
How even history, that lewd eye that would strip
itself of the simple dignity of hollow bones
(o music that speaks of winds that echo still
in every emptiness: there is nothing empty but
an emptiness turning this moment) cannot see
into the mystery of the lost baskets, the nest
where the fire rekindles dragons and garlands of
pearl-drenched blossoms. O pearl, o hard body of
endurance.

Keep your nose close to the grit stone. There are
a thousand trails to follow, to rub, to uncoil unknot
get tangled up in. Snared from the air, the dirt devils
lift and cloud and dance in the palm that tossed the
fronds of welcome to the agnonistes. O lamb. O I am.

O illusion of the fountain built upon the rock that
melted with the fire pulled from the side of the
devil at the rounded edge of Sarah’s well.

The light snakes across the emptiness shedding skins
of incarnate illusions. There is nothing in the dark.
O beauty. Tremble like grass as the breath of opening
moment after moment. Who shut the door? Is that the
closing of the bar? What pushes me into the river
eddies and flows and tidal embraces. Let go.

Hillman says the rhetoric of the soul says and unsays,
teases, demands, denies first this then that as it
accepts them all2, a mothering hen smothering out
the tongues of angels the eyes of demons the farmer’s
wicked sense of measured appetite. Blind chicks
those eyes were seen as bugs by their broodling
brothers carry the same clucking of attention as
the tinker to the broken clock. Watch the face of
joy. Wake from these horrific dreams of wanton
self abasement with the same terrible sense of a
shutter blinded to what you would finance.

Imagine the devil in the field with his pit and a
ticket, the hot fat of the hog dripping into the
fires. A Sunday picnic on the morrow. Tonight we
dance by glowing coals and palm the breasts of
schoolgirls and randy widows. Sing sea chanteys
and explain the distance between no point and
the point beyond it. Chart these longings
sounding true!

How the ghostly boys can take anything and curdle
it with a single look. Find the bridge and burn it
down and laugh and laugh as the sunset boils in
the frothing mouth of night.

I asked of her only a glance and she saw the armies
of abandon gathered like the hoards at the gates
of hell. Discipline is the thing, they cry, lined
upon the pages row by pixel.

A distant music betrays his fear. He lies low upon
the bare hill, peering just so over the crown, the
lilies sprouting in the light rain, and the archers
loosening their thousand arrows from the ramparts of
Troy falling falling like kisses on the dying heads
of all your frail old fathers. Let not the day pass
without a lament. Let not a day pass without a regret.
Let not a day pass without a glimpse of that radiant
face and the sound of a heart counting the days of a
lover’s purest joy.

And when the bowl is empty sound its song with a dog’s
old bone and watch the road for the next parade.



* * *

When the image presses, follow it. This is not a work
against nature, the work contra naturam is a work that
cannot be. It is a contradiction. We cannot say what is
not. The image, if Hillman is to be trusted, is the one
incontrovertibly true thing.3 Now what one can do, is
ignore images, is wheat and chaff them in the impossible
task set to Psyche by the jealous Aphrodite. But how does
that look without the understanding that the ants are
natural, the instincts follow the distinguishing
features of things as they are, perform the basic
kindergarten exercise of what does not match?

What Goethe found or was looking for when he noticed
the universality of star forms in nature or when
alchemists sought the touchstone that would turn the
common into the uncommon and thus render the multivalent
into a singularity, and so too the efforts of the
astrophysicists to see the whole of existence as a
singularity, and it goes without saying the
philosophical certainty of a set that contains all
subsets subsumes the polyvalent into a jealous
monism is that embrasive inclusiveness that does not
separate, that encompasses even the most vile of
objects and ideals into a pleasing whole. That this
inclusiveness, this clasping of right hand to left
lets everyone off the hook of tragedy. The landscape,
or inscape, of images and archetypal patterns,
templates, repertoires, insists upon the comic
displacement of outside and inside so that no place
is a place excluded of central import.

We all have a place and are in the right place
since the image is eternal, real, and
incontrovertible. Only we are unreal when we
imagine (ha) ours is the course outside or under
the processes of the inscapes.

How we slide or elide only slides us or transports
us to another form of the story. The murkiness or
clarity of an image, its coloration, proximity,
adumbration, all fall like tumblers in the
interlocking matrix of the rhizome. But the story
still eludes us. No matter that wisdom is the source
of our stage. “Athene who makes space within. She
[who] is the inner space-making function of mind,
the Goddess who grants topos, judging where each
event belongs in relation with all other events.”4
Alas, there are men who tell “everything--and it
turns out to be nothing. There are women . . .
who tell everything . . . but one knows no more at
the end than at the beginning: they have hidden
everything . . . . They have no secret because
they have become a secret themselves.”5

Take politics or humor or melodrama. Each roiling
and coiling with secrets. And yet, what distance
must you take to accept the falsity of their images
as true? Not much, it seems. The space of wisdom
there is quite small. They rely on imagistic
templates. They play them straight up or slide one
element to the other ever so slightly and still we
get it. We even buy it again and again. It is the
same story, now tragic, now sad, but always the same
in its folding or unfolding. As Voltaire noted:
It’s a perfect world. Sure he offered the glib
philosophy as a comic critique of the then and
the ever-present socially reprehensible
circumstances of the majority of creatures who
are subject to the o-so-convenient laissez-faire
entitlement of the privileged. And we all know it
and it stares at us like the sun and moon and stars
and we still do nothing but replay the images and
patterns and repertoires like so many analogue
phonographs. Ontogeny recapitulates the afterimage.
The flash of the hole. A pinhole universe. The pinhole
just happens to be exactly as wide and deep and long
as eternity. The space and place that wisdom allots.
Yet wisdom cannot do it. Or rather reason.6
For wisdom goes into those places that are not places,
those spaces that have no map no grid no high ground
to plant a tattered rag and call it your own heaven.
Everyone owns the images of fantasy. Athene has no
there there to claim save the ever shifting where of
once upon a space/time.

So you draw a dog and a man with arms outstretched.
Take a dried worm and patch of grass; intimate a
tree and a decaying city. You patch it with reverse
colors, wash it with waves, sharpen here, murk there,
block a trunk. Note how roots can transform into jaws.
A dog so faithful, so feral; how it pisses on our
handiwork like perhaps a God on our unmet prayers.
You take any element, any form and juxtapose it with
two or more others, the simpler and more concrete the
object the better, and a story implicates itself into
the viewer’s mind. The images have archetypal associations
(instinctual, if one must be empirical), cultural variation,
personal associations, and add the mix of forms and colors
which have their own archetypal, cultural, and
personalistic associations (yes, composition has its own
values as evidenced by trompe d’oeil and optical illusion
work) each viewer will respond with a narrative, with a
space of their own, though no story, no linear plotline
is given. Story will unfold when there are discernible
objects placed in the same frame. Even the most
disparate of objects will yield a story in all viewers,
though some viewers may have a more complete story if
they have a wider range of stories in their own personal
history. The objective correlatives will make more sense
to a person with a wider range of references. But even
the most rudimentarily educated adult will respond
to/with a story presented with a surreal collage of
even vaguely discernible objects. Surreal? Better unreal:
yes, the response is visceral and more authentic because
the unreality of our own condition is thus reflected,
deepened in the reflection.

Mythically potent, Christian images of horned and winged
creatures with trees and dogs and worms and grass will
stir anxiety, will push and pull sympathies for we each
have these images as part of our repertoire. We are
demonic and we know why. We cannot be beaten enough to
ever lose some sympathy for the outcast. We do see god
in a dog and god as cynically abusive. We see praise
and surrender as one movement. We understand the rich
fertility of the worm and the straw like quality of
what binds us to the earth, our homes, our family,
our own sense of self. We may struggle with those
realities, bind our self to the tree or the wounded
demon or the child inside the man or we may distance
our self as the observer, the cool eye of the artist,
the exegete who paints the emotional fire in perfect
strokes as if curls of stone hair were the sculptor’s
greatest joy (and it is even as the reality of the
lover concretizes sublimated or transferred once
to the real hair and further to the stone as if the
distance, the placement or dis-placement makes the
longing all the more real and unreal). And each point
of view the perfect truth of how it feels to be alive.
The analysis just widens, neither right nor wrong but
twisting in a braid of leavings and weavings.

That we will story two stones or even one speaks more
than a thousand books can extirpate from the annuls of
what it means to be beyond the tap of tinker’s damns.

What is a myth? It is the talk of the inarticulate
in the mouths of those who speak for it.

Being inarticulate they have few lines of story;
they speak with simple things, with gesture and color
and shape. But while Hillman may be correct when he
says gesture is the lesser of what soul wants7, it
is the gesture that pushes the tongue to its eloquence.
The movement of an eye, the brush of a hand, or the
uncurling of a strand of hair. The story of the myth
wheat and chaffs itself even as it tells us the same
thing: follow the image into the story of wherever
you are right in this very moment. The myth will play
you, regardless of your awareness. It is as if you
are always dreaming, always forgetting, always
mythless even if you swear you are aware. There is
no absence of myth anymore than there is an absence
of sky if you close your eyes. The story has always
held you. Plato’s cave is an illusion as is the
projection as is the standing up and seeing behind
the curtain. Maya is as evident in certainty as in
absence of illusion. Do you really need to teach
a duck to swim or can you simply release her into
her element?

I unsay all terrible things. I unsay all truths.
I unsay all that binds you to who you would not be.
I unsay all things that keep you from being who you are.
I unsay all things that were not from the first
a thing that wanted only to be a wind that knows your name.
I unsay the unsaying.


Richard Lane Williams

Posted over on MythoPoetry