Unsaying Un Say: The Poetics

deviant art by bigmanhaywood


UnSaying Un Say: The Poetics


I.

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.



* * *

II.

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 Lance Williams

Posted over on MythoPoetry

Line Breaks by Glenn Buttkus