Part of Chapter Three of Vogel #5

Löwe was sitting at his writing table in front of two French windows overlooking the garden and the swimming pool. He held a Cartier fountain pen in his left hand. In front of him was a short stack of white paper made in Italy, which Löwe specially ordered from a shop in Venice. The top page was half covered by his strange, tiny handwriting. To the right was a copy of Plato’s Theaetetus in Greek and further to the right, a stack of blue index cards. Drago took no notice of the books or the writing; he simply placed the tray in front of Löwe, who had pushed his papers further to the right to make room. “It was always like this,” thought Drago. “He is like a baby bird waiting for me to bring his food. When it arrives, he pushes everything away to snap up every morsel. It is like he is starving. What an appetite for such an old man.”

Löwe was hungry as he always was in the morning. He fantasized that his dreams burned up a lot of calories throughout the night. He had been thinking about his dreams when Drago knocked on the door. Last night he had had a strange one. He was fighting in a medieval city against a large foreign army, equipped with war elephants. In the midst of battle, Löwe stood upon an elevated podium and called out to the elephants to come to him until they heard and came, one from the right, one from the left, and one from the center.

“What did it mean?” he asked. An elementary component of dream interpretation was to say the elephants represented a part of him. He suspected they represented three primal sources of power, which he could not control. At the beginning of the dream, they were out of control, destroying men and material, but upon his command, they came to him and stopped.

“Why were there three?” He asked as his mind wondered over the number three. He knew the images had at least two components: meaning, which could be deciphered intellectually; and emotion, which would have to be investigated from the standpoint of its feeling-value.

In other words, to fully comprehend the images he would need to meditate upon the image of the elephant from several viewpoints, a task, which, once begun, seemed quite daunting in its complexity. He rubbed his head, an act which was unconscious, and which signaled he was deep in thought as he let his mind wonder over the image of the elephant, he felt its great size, its color, the stiff hairs of its body protruding from its leathery skin, its smell, its sound as it shifted from right to left on its ponderous legs, larger than tree trunks. He examined the metal and leather harness, which held the platforms onto the three great elephants’ backs and he could see the armored bodies of the archers perched on top of the elephants. He saw the legs of the men sitting on the necks of the large beasts, the wooden handles of the hook in their hands, which they used to turn and guide the great beasts. He imagined the elephants’ pink mouths and their swinging trunk. He asked himself how he felt about the elephant and his first reaction was a feeling of awe at their great size and strength. So how did he control them? What power did he possess to call them?

The dream reminded him of Ganesha; the elephant-headed God of the Hindus, and the first god worshipped at every ceremony, which had the head of an elephant and the body of a round, rotund, overweight man. Accompanying Ganesha are the hooded snakes wrapped around his waist, the lotus, which Ganesha holds in one of its two left hands, an ax, which symbolizes Genesha’s ability to destroy evil, a noose, which emphasizes mankind’s connection to human desire, and the mouse, which provides him with a mode of transportation.

Ganesha was a good sign, thought Löwe, and the appearance of the elephants in his dream was also a strong vision, a message from his unconscious.

Löwe also recognized Ganesha’s duality. He found, or least suspected, a difference between those creatures that bore the head of an animal, such as Ganesha and the Minotaur, and those creatures like fauns and centaurs, which had human heads and animal bodies. He felt that mythological creatures with animal heads were controlled by their natural or animal instincts while those like the centaur and the faun had their human nature controlled by their lower body, which was more basic in its demands and desires. He had not worked out all of the associations and differences, but he suspected a difference. Ganesha, of course, was nothing like the Minotaur, who was rapacious and sadistic.

He immediately thought of a series of dry points, which he had seen in Picasso’s atelier during the war in Paris. He remembered they were called the Vollard Suite and the one, which he remembered vividly almost fifty years after he had seen it, was #68, the Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman. He remembered the day he had visited the atelier. He appeared along with several others for drinks with the Spanish painter. Although he was a German, a soldier, an occupier of Paris, he was on good terms with many of the artists. After all, he was a cultural attaché and his good will allowed many artists in the city to continue their work, to enjoy the patronage of the Third Reich, to sell their art, to receive ample food, and to enjoy their life. Picasso was a Spaniard and Spain was friendly toward Germany. Although Picasso was no friend of Franco and the existing Spanish government, he was willing to meet with Germans who were interested in art in 1941. There were many young, well-educated German officers who were appreciated surrealistic art, even degenerate art, as the Nazi regime called it. Löwe thought the Nazi propaganda against the expressionists and surrealists was ridiculous and he was very interested in Picasso, as well as several others. He was a personal friend of Cocteau and Brasillach and he tried to court as many of the French artists as he could. He had read Breton on surrealism and he obtained a copy of the magazine Minotaure from a friend in Paris, who provided it to him while he was training in Russia in 1934, the year he had met Sartre and Raya. Consequently, when he arrived in Paris as a cultural attaché, one of the first things he did was attempt to see Picasso. It was no problem to find out where the Spaniard lived and he could have easily entered the atelier, but he did not want to use the power at his disposal; instead, he decided to court the Spaniard and play to his ego. When he finally met him, he asked about the Vollard Suite, about the series of dry points, which spanned many years. When Picasso showed him the works, he was immediately attracted to the mythic character, which Picasso was obviously using as an alter ego. Löwe realized immediately that Picasso’s Minotaure was connected to the Dionysian spirit and he began to identify with the lusty representation of the Minotaur. As a result of the strong feeling tone he associated with the creature, Löwe began to investigate the source and quality of his feelings. He now believed that the appearance of Ganesha was similar to those earlier associations with the Minotaur and that his identification with the Minotaur and the appearance of Ganesha were signaling some significant change in his psychic life.

Löwe believed in both physical and spiritual evolution. The spiritual evolution was always a movement toward wholeness and this progression manifested itself to consciousness through images, images sometimes in the form of mandalas. With the appearance of the elephant, he felt his unconscious was trying to signal something to his conscious mind; therefore, he had to use various psychological techniques to learn the meaning of the images. This process was tedious and long in duration. He knew that now the elephant had appeared to his conscious mind it would stay with him for some time. It would stay until he understood its meaning.

“Shall I put this down, sir?” asked Drago, reminding the old man of the present and his hunger.

“Of course. I am sorry, I was lost in thought.”

Drago had the coffee pot in his right hand and a cup and saucer in the left.

“Your food is getting cold.”

“What time is it?”

“It is 8:25.”

“I must hurry. There is so much to do before the journalists arrive.” Löwe said absently, as he began to eat the now cold oatmeal.

Drago poured him a cup of coffee and then put the silver coffee pot down and retired from the room, leaving the man to his thoughts.

As Löwe slowly chewed the oatmeal, he imagined the Minotaur lying on a bed with a woman sprawled across his lap, while the sculptor, another character of the Minotaur saga of Picasso, lay on the other side of the woman, holding a champagne flute in one hand and a swooning woman in his left. The Dionysian atmosphere was so obvious that one had to start from there in the analysis of the sketch. The image of the Minotaur touched a psychological cord and reminded him of his years in Paris before the war, a time of great emotional and intellectual activity for him. Now, another mythical creature had entered the stage, Ganesha, a mixed being as well, full of strength, exuberance, and life. Löwe, though old in body, felt ripeness in his mind and a stirring somewhere in his loins. He was not dead yet.

He felt the images of the elephant signified a feeling of strength, a solidity of mind and concentration. He reached for the stack of blue index cards and wrote the words: Ganesha, Dionysus, Minotaure, Picasso, and Elephant. He would have to explore each name and meditate upon them. He had had a long experience with dreams and dream analysis and he knew the dream was the via regia to his unconscious mind and that once this passageway was opened, unlimited images would force their way into his conscious mind, just as water would flow from the earth to the surface at a spring. He imagined himself dipping a gourd into a spring.

Freedom is Between the Notes

poetry blooms on the paths of faery


Mr. and Mrs. Stevens select a black Steinway
for their sun room in anticipation of summer.
Like a black bird it awaits the sirens
that sing operettas on the west side
between the ice-cream vendor from Venice
and the jeweler from Charleville.
After the thaw, silent summer arrives
and Mrs. Stevens takes a steam train alone
to the Poconos and Mr. Stevens remains
in the city to advocate for the insureds
and play the piano. For seven hours straight
the first night he scratches the ivory keys
like a snowcat against Orpheus' tree.
And so proceeds the solstice quotidian;
the infinitesimal gesture of their separation:
Mrs. Stevens golfs and Mr. Stevens plays.
Once, however, he pauses to erase a moist circle
left by his highball glass and Mrs. Stevens writes
requesting more money. He begrudgingly wires
her five dollars. On another day, he puzzles
out the latest Schoenberg and she buys
a dress. In August rain falls on Manhattan
island and the water drains into the sea.
Most days though, Mr. Stevens pilots
a skiff between the keys of half-notes
that litter the green waters of the archipelago.

Insels

Islands of ice.
Electrical veins at night
silhouette brave borders
and slender shores. Stages
of yellow boards to play
the jester or the king,
while leviathans patrol
gulf streams and Catalinas
painted midnight-blue
hunt the darkness for Shelley's
monster preserved on a floe.

Anecdote of the Psyche

No continents exist in the summer islands.
Instead the islands in-dwell in the castaway's gray iris,
where white sharks circle beneath a beached raft
that lists left in a lissome jolt with each azure wave
and parakeets with blue and green wings pinion a tattoo
at retreat toward a swiss-ed psyche. Landfall
stretches the comet's tail and a maitre'd arrives
and recites French, while the barefoot castaway stands
on warm sand beside a chaise longue marked reserved.
In that internal archipelago a snowcat purrs
in an apple-barreled rum in the castaway's daiquiri,
informing him that the first island begats the second
and the second births the third, and the fourth
mirrors the first and the first awakens a fifth
and there is no end nor order outside the rhythm
of the islands and no sound except the drone of a Hellcat,
scouting off the mid-way, and the pilot's hand vibrating on the stick
as icebergs calve from green glaciers in the north.

Archipelago

The castaway sails between the northern islands
and mines a frozen continent with his art
like the earthworm mulls mold in Darwin's garden.

Anecdote of the Garden

Krazy Kat's fur is black
like the bruised wing of a crow.

Firecat is red
like the speckled eye
of a peacock's feather.

Krazy Kat appeared first,
like Abel, in the world.

Firecat will arrive later,
the last one before the end.

Firecat and Krazy Kat share
the silky sand of his garden.

Krazy Kat slumbers in the shrubs
in the doomed darkness of dusk,
while Firecat doozes on the grate.

Another mediates the in-between;
Snowcat purrs under the red rushes
beyond the bed of purple irises.

Snowcat loves Krazy Kat and Firecat.

Snowcat exists in perpetual winter;
she is the queen of snow
that blows from ether.

Snowcat cannot purr; her throat
is blocked; the glottal stop
is wrecked. Instead, she listens
while Firecat and Krazy Kat sing
a stone-song
trending toward harmony.

Paraclytus

The poem sags
from definition.
It is invisible
to all but the unseen,
who are only seen
by the invisible;
heard only
because
winged tongues
sometimes scratch
then erase
inked messages.

Milieu

this experience constitutes a world


The crystal sand in the stained
box
dwells within the snail's memory
of the castaway
who walked on his head.

Shipwrecked
yet again in the space
between the quietude of play
and the quotidian
worm mold, he scribbles
on Egyptian papyrus
an anecdote of a black
chow
that fetches an artifact
of glued feathers
and glittering leviathan bones.

Pete's Dead

It
flies on blue
and green
wings
from the chair
to the couch.
I shoot
a wooden arrow
with a rubber
tip
and strike
it dead.
Eros
weeps,
as we bury it
in a red
and black
matchbox
in the brown yard
behind the white
house.

White Worm

Dwelling in the black,
the white worm called
out: some say white
orders, while chaos'
shadow destroys.
But the circumference
soon centers
that noirish truth.
The worm blanched
by the dark
is no more stable
than a crease
of light
over a lake
on a summer night
or a pursed
lip over her ear.

Wir Lagen and Worms

I have been thinking a lot about earthworms and for some reason, this morning, the worms reminded me of one of my favorite Paul Celan poems. It is entitled:


Wir Lagen.


by Paul Celan
translated by Keith Harvey



We lay
already deep in the shrubs, when you
finally crawled along
but we could not
darken over to you:
it ruled
light constraint.


Wir lagen
schon tief in der Macchia, als du
endlich herankrochst
Doch konnten wir nicht
hinuberdunkeln zu dir:
Es herrschte
Lichtzwang

Night-soil

The night-soil
of Darwin's
worms
is saltier
than Persian
caviar;
whereas,
Rumi's poetry
swallows
smoother
than a Gulf
oyster
in November.

The Worms

The snails slumber
in the shade
of the rose leaf,
while the worms
below
churn black soil
like the steel
propeller
of a gray cruiser
furrows
green waves
in the southern sea.

Leaping Poetry and Primordial Words

I just finished reading Robert Bly's "Leaping Poetry, an Idea with Poems and Translations." In the work Bly attempts to explain what is happening in the poetry of Lorca and Neruda, Rilke, and the surrealists. Lorca tried to describe the phenomena himself in his brilliant book "Duende." Edward Hirsch picked up the thread in his book, "The Demon and the Angel." Paul Celan tried to explain it in his short prose pieces; just as Heidegger did in his work on poetry and Holderlin. Wallace Stevens wrote from it and tried to articulate it. Henry Corbin found it in the Iranian poets and called it the Mundus Imaginalis. What is it, then?

Bly says that it is the "leap" within the poem from the conscious to unconscious mind. But what it really is, is man, the myth-maker, making soul. Soul is made by man through his exploration of the unconscious contents of the world in a valiant attempt to make conscious what is unconscious. Soul-making is the evolution of myth through man's intense identification with his body and the surrounding nature. It is this action of evolving which occurs in Wallace Steven's poem "Anecdote of a Jar" and it is Paul Celan's groping in the dark to reach the other. It is the metaphor for the incarnation of god in man.

I wrote "Petroglyphs" as an expression of my struggle to understand the numinous feeling I received when reading certain poets--Rilke and Celan, in particular. I felt that this feeling arose from their use of certain images that contained the archetypal seeds of primal emotions. I called these images the "primordial word" and associated the "primordial word" with the word Logos. Logos is the creative force implicit in the creation of the Christian mythos. In my terminology the primordial word contains a primal emotion that connects us to an archetypal emotion. Consequently, the primal word functions as a portal that takes us to the Mundus Imaginalis--that mid-world between the conscious and the unconscious mind. It is the mid-world where great poetry resides. Shakespeare was a master of it. Ted Hughes understood and used it. Lorca had it, just as Celan and Rilke do. Bly reaches for and worships it. Therefore it is the "leap" that turns the stone of image that contains the poem.

Shamans, priests, and myth-makers depend upon the primal word to enter the Mundus Imaginalis. It is in that state that visions reside and the collective consciousness flows like a river. The entry way always demands a ritual. Surrealists use automatic writing; shamans use trances and self-inflicted illnesses; mystics use hunger and prayer; Sufis whirl; poets and Freudians associate. No matter the process, the goal is the same--to reach the mid-way, the Mundus Imaginalis--to tap into the collective unconscious to share the vision of the world and the language of the angels.

Therapy

The point is a whole
and contains no points.
A line is a series of points.
Two points and a line begins.
We sat, two points,
three days a week
for twelve years
talking. We formed
two lines at right angles,
an analyst and an analysand.
Lines have no breath;
they sigh breathless.
from their silence.
Worlds form
from the angularity
of their sound
like a mound
of dirt above
a mole's hole.

Mauryad

The Zero
swiveled
from the sun
and sprayed
lead
from Pittsburgh
into the round
fuselage
of the Grauman
Hellcat.
Maury
from Tucson
jumped
through the flames
into a darkening sky
black with oily smoke.
His silk chute
snapped
and he jerked,
his jumpboots
dancing
above wisps
of jellied clouds.
His Hellcat
crashed into the sea.
A caesura
before
it cracked the surf
like the claw
of a Baltimore crab.
Maury caught
a silver glint
off a steel strut
as the Zero
turned.
He was alive,
but now a castaway.

The green sea
teemed
with dolphins,
leaping
in the surging
surf
off a pink,
coral atoll.
Beneath,
hammerheads
circled
the sinking Hellcat
and flying fish
spit
upwards
in mirrored
pirouettes,
mocking
the steel
weight
that the sea
transformed
into rust.
Maury invested
his rubber vest
with air
and floated
on his back.
Next stop,
he whispered,
is hell.

No land.
Only an atoll
of pink coral
to rest his head.
Maury sensed
the sharks
and the leviathans
circling below.
One whale
eyed him
with such empathy
that Maury imagined
it wept
for his plight.
His head
grated
against pocked coral
and he grasped
with wrinkled fingers
the mottled
reef
and pulled
himself from the sea.
The moon
now a silver circle
centered
above the pacific
sea
shone
upon his berth
on the atoll.
Safe now,
he said,
"I am hungry."


The atoll stretched
like a withered finger
a kilometer
from east to west,
covered with a skein
of salvaged sand.
The only food
was sand fleas
and gulls' eggs.
Just beyond his reach
fish teemed.


Days passed
and then months.
Now naked
Maury danced
on his coral stage.
Once he found
a black spider
lodged
in a coral niche.
He named it god
and worshiped it.

Eventually,
Maury forgot
the language
of the surface.
He came
to speak
leviathan
and dolphin.
He could even converse
with his sworn enemy
the gulls.
Sometimes
he wore their feathers
to honor their sacrifice.
He rode the fins
of the porpoise
and mosaic shells
of sea turtles.
He grew gills
and slept in caves
deep within the rifts
that ran across the floor
of the sea.

Finally,
Maury walked
on his head,
his webbed feet
firmly against the waves.
He cursed
ships
that cut troughs
in his roof
and submarines
that penetrated
his solitude.
Sometimes,
he visited
the atoll
and coughed
when he breathed
the oily, acrid
air of the surface
and dreamed
of the topsy-turvy
world
of the Hellcat.

Remembering Reading Donleavy

I met them thirty-five years ago when I entered graduate school. They had been there the whole time, of course, but I had been in the History Department, not the English Department, and I didn't know who they were. And then again they were from the area, all local boys, sort-of-- from Lufkin, Nacogdoches, Houston-- and their girls were local too. Tough women from the big thicket or Louisiana. I was from up North near the Red River and not one of them really.

They thought I was rich at first but I wasn't. I lived in an apartment and drove a new car because I had worked in the construction business with my father and I made good money before I transferred in. I had studied at the college in my home town that was later absorbed by the state university before I transferred to the teacher's college, where I learned they ruled the English Department. Counting their girls, there was seven or eight of them and they made the top grades and led the discussions and chose the writers we were supposed to worship.

Like I said I had been in the History Department before graduate school and all my reading had been done in silence . I read most of the modern fiction in the college library by the time I arrived in the graduate program and I preferred European writers. In 1974, my favorites were Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, and Lawrence Durrell. They didn't like those writers; instead, they liked Hemingway and Pynchon, Borges and Vonnegut, Roth and Bellow. I liked those writers, too, but they weren't my favorites.

At the time I arrived I was reading Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. I also liked science fiction and I tended to read it indiscriminately. I was also studying German and planned to go to Germany as soon as I graduated.

They tended to ignore me at first but slowly they came to see me. It was probably the fight over Lawrence. I argued that Women in Love was one of the greatest novels ever written. When I said it, cat-calls issued from the room and the fight began. However, it was from that fight that the recognitions began. And although I liked the English and the Germans like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, I seemed, eventually, to at least qualify for a junior membership in their clique because--here was the nub of it--I was a massive reader. And in the end it was the reading that qualified me to enter their presence. They couldn't deny the reading. It was too palpable, too catholic to be denied.

One night at the local donut shop on North Street at two o'clock in the morning the warring ended when the name J. P. Donleavy was mentioned. Unanimous consent was arrived at when we discussed The Ginger Man. We weren't sure why we liked it. Donleavy's prose was mentioned several times in a vague way. All we knew was that The Ginger Man's prose spoke to our sensibility.

Reading The Ginger Man now, I will tell you it is the poetry, not the prose that attracted us. And I might add that the sex and the bookish life in poverty and the youth also caught our attention.

Does anyone read Donleavy anymore? I haven't heard his name in years but they should. His prose still sparkles. Maybe someone with some clout will read him and then he will be re-discovered.

Incarnation

The imagination
shines
from the center
and incarnates
Abel's flesh.
Through the circle
he knows
the circumference
and the round-ness
of the jar.
From the forest
the unknown
vibrates black
and void;
while within
the sphere
sustains
all light.

While Reading William Carlos William's Autobiography

William Carlos Williams was a physician. From his autobiography I get the sense he was a very good one. He worked long hours saving lives and then he wrote poetry; a lot of poetry. From his autobiography, I gather the poetry informed the medicine and the medicine informed the poetry; just as his friendships informed his poetry or the city of Patterson did. A Jungian would say he lived poetically; just as Heidegger would, who wasn't a Jungian but a philosopher of being and poetry, or better yet as Holderlin wrote and Heidegger explained. The upshot is that poetry is emotion expressed. To live a life of poetry or to live poetically is to express the emotions of being. It is this task which makes people want to be poets; they want to live in the world poetically. So there is the task of being, to be, poetically, in the world of being.

Anecdote of the Center

In a Salon de The
in Algiers
a man in white
instructed the other:
take a linen
sheet of Egyptian
leaf
and a draw a circle
in the center.
Fill it with graphite
from Pennsylvania.
Wait
for the world
to coalesce
around
its circumference.
Then blow
upon its borders
until it inflates
into a white sphere.
When the pressure
equalizes
balance
it like Chaplin's
globe;
rotate it,
do it,
until it holds.