Shamanic jimson in everyone, the human Xibalba
a cosmogonic patch where twisting language retwists,
metaphorizing at the speed of dream, touching
the opaque shoulders of smoking trees, lighting
campfires in the backs of gigantic caterpillars.
This perception of paradise, first apprehended in
the Upper Paleolithic, I experience asleep,
via dreaming. Paradise is close, so close as to be
maddening. Paradise is in our brains.
What Blake calls Albion is this ancient
creative zone.
The Fall is not original sin,
the Fall is that abyss between here and
original imagination,
which we inherit as shamanic longing.
As one attempts to cross an abyss, metaphors
transmogrify so quickly
the initiate's receiver jams, loses its bearing,
deconstructs, like those divers
making their way through the 500 foot
waterfilled tunnel leading to the Cosquer cave—
the silty kicked-up sediment blinded them,
they lost their way among submerged stalagmites,
drowned.
In the 1940's the 20th century broke in
two.
A revised version of hybrid man
—Auschwitz and Lascaux in the same
brain—
complexed its obsession with "homeland."
Fueled with primal glory and Zyklon B, it
sings:
"I'm
always trying to get back
to
my little caul shack on Ancestor Delta.
If
somebody else—Kosovar, Arab, or Jew—
happens
to be there,
I'll
claim he is air, and plant my fangs
in
his 'absence.'"
I sat down on the steps of The Ivory Tower
and wept. The American's Guatemalan husband
had not only been kidnapped but tortured
and murdered. She doesn't know but knows,
her 11 year old son is nearly cross-eyed
with knowing, and I know, sitting on the
bed edge, before PBS 12. Trying to gag her
terror and grief, so as to be able to carry
on with the interview, she finally pulls
her blouse up over her face—as if to
teach me another dimension of "the
faceless woman" said to crouch on a
bridge below the roots of the World Tree.
I dream of lifting up this head, and assessing
its weight, knowing full well it is impossible
to weigh the unending assault on women's
bodies and personalities by the guardian
husbands and brothers.
"Be forever dead in Eurydice."
Be forever reborn in Persephone.
A run runs through the morphologies of paradise.
Boogie-woogie of our diagrammatic sentence:
death and the possibility of redemption
in
a single act.
For 1500 years, Eleusis, spiritual homeland of the Greeks. What did
the initiates behold—which they were sworn on the penalty of
death to not reveal—in the Telesterion?
| 1] |
An ear of corn reaped in silence? |
| 2] |
A cereal wafer, the seed-kore, which they ate? |
| 3] |
The Divine Child, or Savior, variously named Brimus, Dionysus,
Triptolemos, Iasion, or Elenthereros the Liberator, laid in a
manger (or winnowing basket), whose flesh was eaten by the initiates
in the form of bread, made from the first or last sheaves? |
| 4] |
An artificial vagina, kept in the cysta mystica, which
they touched? |
| 5] |
An omphalos, or birth cone, representing the cervix, with fruits
and flowers, and a child emerging from a horn of plenty? |
| 6] |
The spirit of Persephone herself, returned from the dead with
her new-born son, conceived in the land of death? |
Whatever they beheld—since it was said to bestow happiness,
the true life, freedom, respite from all troubles—must have confirmed
to them: after they entered the earth they would rise again.
And who knows as well what the sacred king
saw
the instant the goddess veil was lifted—
an afterlife? The origin of life? A scowl-vale
of eternal
gray?
Ah, dear tricky veil, you make us think,
quest,
you are the rent/unrent conundrum
provoking our initiational probes to translate
the plutocracy of the literal.
Not to lift or rend, but to translate the
veil.
The head of Hercules must be veiled
for the god, via omenta symbolics, to be
reborn.
Yet we know that rebirth too
is
a halfway house.
No
one has been to death
and returned to say: Emily is there, following
her fly,
or, Artaud is happy, he has learned to bowl,
or, Pinochet is a 60 jab-a-second forked
barbecue.
Dear veil, speak
to us of your fiber origin!
"We, the Mothers of Lascaux, extracted
fibers from celestial plants, located
the entheogens, set undulating
broken lines as coiling winds, winding torrents.
Channels of moisture circulated in our mouths
imbuing thread-like fibers with helicoids strength.
by opening/closing our jaws, working
our entire faces, while breathing, we formed sound
strands, speech lattices,
what you call the revealed Word,
the veil word—
thus to life the veil is an act we Mothers disavow.
To lift the veil would be to see the earth
naked, speechless, as on the first day,
amidst the chaos of origin fiberless spirit,
the not we knotted."
