Rhadamanthys

Dear readers,

Do forgive my lapse as of late. I've been feeling quite horrid. And, I can feel a pain, physical, now, that seems to be worsening. I am seeing a doctor today, fortunately, though it's not one of my specialists, more a GP Fellow. I am worried I'll end up in the ER or hospital, hopeful, though, I can breathe through this.

So, before I pursue today, I'd prefer sharing a poem I wrote in an hour during the AM yesterday. It's page 53 of my book of poems, Persephone. And, it pertains to my father, is actually a dedication, though, it also signifies the immense love he had for my mother before he passed (away). It's called Rhadamanthys because in Greek mythology R was a judge of the under or "ether" world. In this poem, my speaker wants to go with the heroes to Elysian fields, but wants to take his love, who hasn't yet passed, with him. It plays on the concepts of "we" being the judge of "our" souls. Which is why I called it Rhadamanthys. In many ways, my speaker embodies Rhadamanthys...

I hope you don't abhor it. Again, do forgive my absence. I've been in SUCH a precarious state:

Rhadamanthys
When the Lark leaves, and day, and night
Are ushered by the stars, and their decayed light
Ushers asphodel up aisles of white roses,
Not meant to be colored by Aphrodite’s blood,
The love and yearning of its embrace
Put to the cask to Death’s blank face,
There is nothing to dreams, no place
For anything, but the shadow of your Grace,
And Love. Your eyes, broken chrysanthemums
Of yellow, the poise to which I follow
Soul, to its deep and broken Day,
There is no will or way, to my dismay,
At knowing I go without, you, saffron Soul.
I will alone the movement willing me,
Up a black river, the water I will not drink
For fear every scent from your golden bloom
Will be lost, and the touches of rosebay
Urging me to their embrace, will take the place
OF my empty tomb, and make of it something new.
A doll you can primp and groom,
A scarecrow, with beaded eyes and a sown red smile,
When I’d much rather be stone,
A monument of black, that grief will give rain,
And wind will give shape, shaped in the loam
Of your golden shadow. It may be I’ll wear away,
And somewhere else, wear the Elysian garland
Of which we always dreamed we’d both wear,
Some time after the death of day and night.
But I cannot go, as I go, and am willed,
But give you something, of me. My light,
Take my garland of thorns, from which laurels will bud
And in their birth rage in oceanic waves, and waves of sound.
To all the waves that make up everything, and give nothing,
I give you. And I am judge, and I am victor,
And I will wear the perfect garland, to match your laurels,
And wait for you, in Elysian fields, just not, as you think,
With Paris and Hector and Achilles and all the kings.
But a mile beyond its gates, before reed lined honey lakes
And the honeyed sun smiles, on everyone.
I’ll be the one on the edge of dark, straw, and pinned to
Golden wheat, scaring away all the larks who here
Are like crows, feasting on the rancid meat of life.
For I cannot measure eternity, until your yellow eyes
Open and shine, from the dream and wake of life and death,
And take me baiting, with their fading breath.

Crazy take on Demeter

A crazy person's take on Demeter:


DEMETER

Fear not the heat of the sun
As you turn your back to shadow,
And find a fiercer brand
Upon your brow
Than any night or curmudgeon shade
Could possibly avow.

The world has feral brevity
To mark its face;
A panther’s footprint
The strange allure
Of finding death much deader
Than it ever was before.

But you have borne a shadow
By turning your face to Apollo,
Ripped from womb
The blond canal
That made its voice grow silent
Makes it still grow tonal.

And you listen for a cry
To tune your currents to Simois;
For a tired Andromache
Lost beyond the world
Weeping in needle point rivers
With currents yet unfurled.

There’s nothing you can give
Not to negate her death;
But to pretend she lives
Just this little shadow
Fussing upon your breast
You feed it to the gallows.

You give it to the sun
This little brand you birthed;
Still to find what brands her face
A light where shadow has no place
To run its fatal glory
Makes you her murderer.


.
There's so much that can be said of shadow. It really is what the sun brands upon us. When I wrote this poem, tonight, I wanted to figure Demeter not just as a sad sobering mother. But as a woman implicating herself in the murder of her daughter (Persepone).

The last stanza, you give it to the sun... makes you her murderer, is significant in the logic of my unhinged mind for one reason. It attempts to warrant Demeter's insanity, waiting half the year for her daughter's return. The poem is meant to be Demeter thinking to herself, believe it or not. And I suppose, she feels she is the murderer because she sacrifices what brands her (Demeter) in order to see a place where there are no shadows, her daughter's artless face. Only to realize, this would be murder, because her daughter has inexorably changed. PERSEPOHE has been murdered, already, you see. A part of her is murdered each year, re-creating a succession of counterfeits, much like the seasons, when leaves wither and are re-created, for example...

It's meant, despite being horrid, to implicate the fulfillment of fantasy in the murder of dreams.

And, as I am feeling quite horrid, quite sick, I best be off...

Pulchrum Est Paucorum Hominum!

L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE

I've been coursing through two poems, in Paris Spleen and The Flowers of Evil. L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE (Paris Spleen) and Invitation To The voyage (The Flowers of Evil). In the former, Baudelaire presents a black tulip (which I utilized in a poem on The Soul of Art), and a blue dahlia. Both incomparable, both part of this wonderful country, a country of Cocaigne, where a curtain's fold breathes forth a curious perfume, a perfume of Sumatra whispering "come back." The Soul of the abode.

I'm intrigued by these two flowers because they can only thrive here. A country so beautiful and full of calm. And Baudelaire asks "Would you not there be framed within your own analogy, would you not see yourself reflected there in your own 'correspondence' as the mystics say?"

For some time this question baffled me. I wondered to what analogy he could be referring, and something struck me, reading Invitation to the Voyage (The Flowers of Evil). Here Baudelaire speaks of the soul's loneliness, noting her own "sweet and secret native tongue." The Black Tulip and the Blue Dahlia speak their own sweet and secret native tongue. They are lonely, except in this land, where beauty and calmness prevail, they are framed within themselves. Their endemic strangeness speaks back to them as beauty, which speaks back to the strangeness as revelation. And what is this revelation, except "come back?"

I think both poems speak to the soul not only of poetry but the poet. The notion of poetry being an invented instinct is something I've believed for quite some time. But, the notion of "coming back," is more endemic to poetry (and the poet) than anything I can surmise. The strange beauty of the flowers, which would be outcasts anywhere else, is like the images a poet sets forth. The creative trajectory, where imagery speaks to itself and the form a poem wants to take talks back.

There's a state, I'm not even certain I can fashion, of reciprocity, where strangeness feeds on beauty and beauty strangeness. But the two can only be had in an environment that allows them to thrive. Some would say this environment is the soul. I would say this environment is art, a poem, a painting, etc., To which the soul is conceived. Much as we conceive nature with artfulness. For we can only view it (nature) through human eyes, so the art is actually more natural than nature (itself). The same is true with the soul. It is, actually, found through an invitation to a strange land, the land of art, and re-creation. The land that asks us to come back, to everything we are, and all we never knew but always had.

I'm including below a poem I wrote within the eternity of an hour today, about Narcissus; some of the thoughts herein manifest in what I've written above, at least the concept of "coming back":

NARCISSUS

A mirror doesn't shift,
Its glass remains in tact
For the face that always drifts
From youth to hoar winter,

When he fixed his face
In a pool of shifting glass
He didn't have the grace
To fix his face in loam,

But assumed his eyes
More azure than the pool
Would betray the disguise
Of knowing they would die,

Chalcedony skin, ruby lips
He felt they were like stone
And shaped them into quips
Against' the liquid's wit,

His image was his place
The sphinx that was a fop
And he brushed his face
With his curled fingers,

And knew there was a riddle
Only he could solve
But his curiosity, so little,
A seed that could not grow,

Offered nothing, no question
No answer, to its bloom
Just the sun's obsession
In making his image grow,

If there were rain or clouds
He certainly would know
The beauty of the shroud
Is in knowing time will wither,

To flower the first image
From the apple not bitten,
To equate his frozen plumage
In the vision of a snake.

Cesare... Evil's Vocation

CESARE



A star’s vocation isn’t light

But fine muslin of deepest black,

And caught within the rosewood night:

Fibers of blood and thorns unkempt...

Keep the shadow of his doors unlocked,

Let no light but ashen roam,

Exude from them my fatal night

And make from clay their fetal loam.



So I so shapeless shape his gaze

And will where eyes all willing wants

Escape and thieve the prolific haze,

That breeds in slums and sooty wombs,

The sooty brood of death and want,

Their brilliant dark diurnal haunt.



***



I do not know the way to day,

To see in light maternal slants

On hemlock, rose, the shadow-play

The sun makes on her favorite child…

But go I do on his command

The one who makes blood syrupy,

A knife between my fingers,

My tenderness too monsterly.



I walk through space without his eyes,

Anemones, purple, red, and pink

Black centered stars, my alibis,

For all he asks, I think and do.

But can I love in dusky pinks?

When death creates what beauty thinks?





I had a dream some time ago, where someone I love said "evil is not destructive; evil is creative." And although, when I told this person about the dream, her reaction (that she was told the same thing- in a dream) astounded me. I must say, the truth of it astounds me more.



I've been trying to conceptualize how this could be true, only to realize, it's all transparent. Evil creates states in us, which, by very means of their vocation, recoil from creation unto destroying the very evil that makes them... endemic. If you take, for example, something as horrific as the death of a loved one. The occurrence is undoubtedly evil, but after its initial impact, you create another being that must adapt without that person, in the flesh. A being that, if artistic, will even fall further into an abyss (to rival Charybdis), and, create, or as I oft say, re-create from this experience a reactive spectrum. A spectrum that is the embodiment of life, thus destroying the evil, death, which made it, nurtured it, and brought it to chaotic fruition.



The same could be said for states of mind. It is often the anger, the "evil," the resentment, the "demons," the self deception, that creates the best Art, and, by lieu of that, the greatest personalities. Because, to compensate for pain, many of us are in a life long struggle, the mortal coil, and we create (re-create) a "good," within, that works to be a product of this pain, this evil, yes, but the very force which destroys it, too. So, in this particular incidence, evil is creative and good predominantly destructive, as it obliterates the very evil that "made" it.



There are countless cycles in the history of man that show we have evil proclivities. Fascism. Racism. Etc., And I would by no way justify these occurrences. I am of the belief, however, that the evil they embody works to re-create an "other," an antithesis, if you will, which, in its very means of power, could destroy this very evil. Racists and Fascists and Fundamentalists are hopeless; they think what they are doing is right and good, and this makes their philosophy destructive. People who rebel against these evils, however, have the evil itself as an impetus to foster creativity, to create, not a new ideal, because ideals in their "goodness" are generally destructive, but a more malleable mode of being. A revolution can only exist against antithesis; I'm stating the obvious, it is something we all know.



And this all relates to my above poem. I've had an interesting Thanksgiving weekend. The first one without my father, who passed from cancer/metastatic melanoma/an insidious demon (the cancer), nothing less than Evil. My father was its antithesis. He was wise, humble, kind, and cognizant of things I'm not certain I'll ever learn. On Thanksgiving day, my sister, mother, and I visited his grave, the tombstone of which we hope will be up by Christmas. And standing there, at this spot so scantily marked, with a broken sea shell we had placed there on our previous visit, we cried (of course). We put a new bouquet of flowers down, and it began to ice or hail (I couldn't tell which), but it was frigid. And in all the motions of my mother and sister, my mother's loving words, my sister's loving gesture in giving me her gloves, I felt an infiltration of my father, an immense infiltration. As if he were there, inspiring us with his creativity. And it seemed to me, at home, even after the lovely meal and lovely company we were all in, I couldn't get over how maybe, despite the evil and pain of the experience of loss, we found something, a hotel eternally vacant, within, comforted without by the ceaseless cycle of life and decay, and in this eternal decay, this eternal "evil," beauty. The beauty of who he was, who we are because of him, and what we will become, even without his physical presence.



A similar thing happened to me with my illnesses. When you're diagnosed with something incurable, you enter another world. You leave something behind that will never be had, again. And evil though this may be, evil though I thought it was that my kidneys should be affected, my depression worsened, my demons abounding, thought processes chaotic, "delusions," medications, pain... I knew there was something else at stake. I just read a Baudelaire prose poem where he says the soul is impalpable, something he wouldn't miss, should it go, like a card left carelessly in his pocket (the subject of the poem was a gamble with Satan). I think, when you lose something so endemic to yourself, your healthy self, when a part of you must be let go to decay, it feels like the giving up of a Soul. But in doing this, in confronting this insurmountable evil, you create a Soul that is palpable, that is variegated, and does destroy the evil, which made it, in an illustrious illusion.



Now to the poem. Today, after puking (forgive the horrid imagery, I'm just being honest), I saw a silent film from 1920, for the first time. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And in said film, there's a somnambulist, Cesare, a zombie like man who enacts all of Dr. Caligari's homicidal tendencies. I need to view the film again. This is only after a first viewing, mind you. But I was enchanted by the premise. Of a man who, stifled by morality, "the greater good," even destroyed by it, enacts his evil through a somnambulist. (I won't go through the whole story as that wouldn't be right, to those who haven't seen it). But, the idea of having evil control and create something that enacts all its tendencies, only to have these tendencies result not just in murder, but the creation of murder, suggests to me a greater metaphor at stake. The doctor's morality was what saved and ultimately destroyed him; it was his evil tendencies that created a "monster," if you will, Cesare, whose will wasn't any bit his own, but whose actions created such a fuss, a fatal fuss, that the repercussions of madness and "evil" were generally re-discovered, seems to me the embodiment of us all. The question is, what can and can't we control?



I've set up the poem as two sonnets, two voices, which I hope you'll pick up on. But even if you've never seen the film, this poem should reveal what you already know. Evil encompasses us daily, and it is a far more creative than destructive force. Whether warring against God or human nature, we're always vying against it; and it is always the impulse for all we are and all we seem, like Poe said, a dream within a dream.

Black Tulip

I've been thinking about my old definition of poetry, why it's so intuitive. Because it reveals to us what we already know. It's an invented instinct. Takes us to re-discovery. I still abide by this definition, though I'm always cautious, as pertains to definitive claims. After reading a prose poem from Baudelaire (from Paris Spleen), I realized what poetry is saying to us. And that is, come back (!). It embodies the primordial encompassing, the nothingness that envelops everything we are and see. Simply, every metaphor it entails, every image, is an attestation to the answer of a question we all ask: why? It is a course in re-discovery, an impetus for letting our instincts escape. And, I believe, this is the answer, escape, embodiment, existing in metaphor without even realizing it. Something in between negative capability and duende. Because of these thoughts, I wrote a poem today about the soul of art. It follows:

THE SOUL OF ART

A black tulip in a field of violets,
A blue dahlia in a glass vase,
Leda left inviolate
To the swan’s impulsive gaze.

The busker on a crowded street
Waiting for some change,
His life the prolonged beat
Of his violin’s unlocked cage.

And the rain pirouetting windows,
With its liquid texture,
Falling like the willow
Under its architecture.

And the busker’s wilting song,
Petal by petals falls apart,
To an uncaring throng
Of those who wilt its art.

As sylphs pass through time,
The migratory hours
Their prolonging grime
Prolongs the lives of flowers.

But nothing can persist
Without the revelation,
A mind cannot exist
Except in elevation.

High above the clouds,
Where nothing has its place,
A star hides among crowds
Of fragrant hues of space.

And here its violin
Is not to entertain
So virtue and thus sin
Make time a pauper’s flame.



Art, to me, is a black tulip in a field of violets. Something so extraordinary, and distinct, it even accentuates the world surrounding (it). Just as nature is manipulated, created by our perceptions, so our perceptions are goaded by it. And it is in this goading, that all art aspires. The primordial encompassing; what was and will or never be.

A bowing flower...

Alas, this is where my thoughts reside, at the moment:

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS

Your footsteps stroke a flower with the texture of grass,
So it seems as the petals withdraw, there is no distance
Between night and day, and the migratory pass
Of the sun, setting and rising to longing and light,
Is just a beacon upon which shadows play.
There is no time where you began, falling earthward,
From a sky who has much more than tears to shed,
All equity ends when a flower bows to being dead.

I cannot resign your fragile little perch,
Sitting upon the cusp of a universe whose embers fall
From ancient conflagrations, to the child Earth,
Where all things are re-made. If you were re-made,
Into more than a bowing flower, I’d count your footsteps
Never again foreseen, the dreaming of an hour that never again seems.


This is really a poem pertaining to grief. Even as it's a sigh from the depths, it's meant to signify the struggle between death and moving forward. I do nor proclaim death here as an equalizer, rather as a dissident.

And I'm dedicating this one to my father, and everyone who has passed. Some of you may know that All Souls' Day passed on November 2nd. I went to a mass, to honor my father, on November 2nd. It was quite... agridulce. I say that because it made me sad, yes, but the thought of eternal re-creation, matter is always preserved, permeated through my little brain, invoking a sweetness that can only be experienced in the throes of innocence.

Yes, we all die, but this does not equalize. If we are equalized, it's in our ability to see beauty. To see, that the same invisible bonds connecting us, are those which made us; the bonds of nothing and everything. The big bang. The tiny little strings vibrating in the universe, providing different dualities.

Simply, the interconnectedness of nothing.

The Haunted Hunt The Hereafter

“It seems, when you lose something, or someone, something strange happens. It isn’t denial. At least, for me, it isn’t. It’s like, knowing at dawn the air’s tears will be wiped away, to clear another aspect of the day, but not even caring. Not even recognizing. In fact, taking everything about this cleansing for granted.
You don’t see the person or thing as gone. An aspect of you is even evil enough to thwart grief. Because, you know, beneath it all, it’s inevitable it happens to all of us. So, the repetition of its occurrence stymies its originality, even as its originality is always sustained when it happens on a personal level."

These are the words of a character in my new, very unfinished novella; the doctor, that is. My novella focuses quite a bit on how death and recurrence both sensationalize and sensitize us. And being haunted, is either true hysteria or the hysterics of consciousness resuscitating the future. Yes, the future. Because, ghosts drive us into the future; we create a boundary for them, yes, they're from the past, they seem to be gone, but they're carried with us into some sphere of nothingness. Strange, how this sphere correlates so well the concept of a hereafter; as if, both the future and the hereafter share a secret not controlled by fate or chance, but denial.

In my novella, Evadne Duncan is haunted by her fiancee, Titus, who died after being struck by a car. They live on an estate, called Malmere, which is 300 feet away from a cliff overlooking the Long Island Sound. Which is surrounded by forest, The Wood. And there's this point of forest, beyond these gates, that is desert-like. Insomuch as once you enter beyond them, the gates, the air is sapped, there are no animals, the trees even seem scorched. It is all nothingness, stillness. And this is where Titus's ghost remains.

Even as my novella deals much with the concepts of love and loss, a pivotal scene occurs when Evadne ventures into this area of the Wood during a storm. As she enters this area, it's hot and stifled. So, she takes off her jacket, and sees Titus, who proclaims Evadne is in the realm of dirt, earth and he in the realm of the shadows and the sky. As Evadne goes farther into the woods, she comes upon a mere, in which she undresses herself, and submerges. And as she emerges to the surface, Titus is watching:

"When she emerged from the depths, she caught Titus’s eye. He was watching her, admiring her voluptuous neo-raphaelite frame. And, maybe because she was still inviolate, she found his eyes a violation upon her soul. And, for the first time, she felt anger towards Titus. Her body became the air, her soul the earth. And Titus trespassed the line that separated them; he ventured too far into the heat of the sun.
Evadne was hunted. He had hunted her all the way to this Lake. A place where she baptized herself in darkness. Just so she could get a glimpse of where he was; but he saw her first, and this was a violation she couldn’t understand."

From here I re-create the myth of Artemis and Actaeon:

“ 'Fear no more the heat of the sun, for it is in darkness that the sun evolves,' she whispered, and shut her eyes. And listened to Titus’s awful cries. 'Evadne! Evadne!' But she could do nothing. She looked at the surface of the lake, played with her finger so that it made little rivulets from the water.
And, Evadne saw her reflection. It was as if she were looking in a mirror, crystal clear, that would break with the touch of a finger. Her eyes were the color of pine, her lips redder than the sun when it melted at dusk. And her hair, in its wetness, frizzed into a mane of blue-black curls.
She was a part of the Wood. She didn’t want to leave. And as she grew more acquainted with the face staring back, she knew it was only Titus who made her this way. So she cried, and her tears hit the lake as drops of blood. There were no nymphets to swim by her side, to console. She was left with the guilt of killing him.
Evadne turned, and saw the hounds devouring the stag. It couldn’t be. She hadn’t killed the thing she loved; even if all things that were loved were destroyed, she couldn’t fathom doing it to him. She wanted to become the air, like he; she had turned him into earth, into fodder for the carnivores, so she could appease her selfish desire, of knowing what it was like to be ethereal and sublime.
She shooed the hounds away. And knelt over the dead stag. And her tears were no longer tears of blood, but dirt. Which, as she cried more, became muddy. It wasn’t until she gazed at the sky, now grey and thunderous, that she knew she had disturbed the balance. The stillness that only the dead deserved."

I focus on this myth because my novella pertains to the significance of myth, yes, but also because the concept of violation infiltrates every haunting. And here's where I want to go with this stumbling blog. In being violated, like Artemis, Evadne violated her boundaries; she had Titus turned into a stag, devoured by his own hounds. All because she wanted to violate him in the way he had violated her. To show him the boundaries, between earth and shadow. And, to show him that in becoming earth again, that in dying again, he had really killed her. It wasn't the guilt over killing him that's meant to be significant here; it's the guilt of disturbing balances, between here and the hereafter.

There's still quite a way for me to go with this piece. But, it isn't just a Henry James Turn of the Screw (I shouldn't say isn't just, because James was a genius, and the boundaries between madness and real haunting so ephemeral, in his famous novella, that you wonder if the two aren't co-dependent on each other). And, I suggest everyone watch The Innocents; Truman Capote and his co-writers did a fine job adapting James' novella to the screen. But, back to the "reality" of this blog, it does more than dance with hysteria and "truth." It accesses the very means by which we're violated, daily, by death. And how recognizing this, helps us cooperate with life in a way that isn't prosaic, but, mythic. As Dolores (Evadne's mother "maman") thinks:

"What were ghosts but the lingering resolutions left behind? The things that had no beginning or end. But lived in the mind by virtue of being made up?
Dolores had never really seen a ghost so realistic as Titus. There was a time, when she could feel eyes upon her, on the estate, before he died. When it seemed people were whispering, she even heard them, words not meant to be heard, but experienced. And the experience wasn’t in their translation. But in the fear their mood translated.
Maybe Evadne understood this, but never let on. She had to protect her daughter. She couldn’t let her go. But how what that suffice with Mitch? He seemed to linger on the doctor’s every word, as if, it were too difficult for him to grasp that maybe this ghost wasn’t a figment. But a fragment of something grander than imagination. Of our need to manage the world by holding on to all we must let go."

Do we manage the world by holding on to all we "must" let go? Or is this letting go a survival tactic? An illusion meant to allude us to times, which, may not have been better, but carry with them the conscience of antiquity?

I know from experience, as I miss my father dearly, how difficult it is not just to "let go," of the physical being, but to live in the fruition of their hereafter. To mine the ascendancy of what we'll never know. And by being here, go to places that make us angry, "irrational," and, more than anything, sad. Almost like having your lifeblood severed from its breath. I'll end with something Evadne tells her mother, about Titus, because this really sums it up:

“ 'I don’t know, maman, it’s just, I’ve always seen this world as a self-containing place. Where what we are within takes us without. And really, it’s what's without that takes us within. Titus taught me this; seeing him, after he ‘died.’ I took a handful of his soul, and turned him into a cluster of chrysanthemums and kept them close to my heart. And all this reminded me that the secret to life isn’t death, it’s having your beauty severed from its breath.' ”