Every planet conforms to a celestial orbit in which the cosmic order repositions itself, one by one : a planet is a hunter of times.
This language is a horizon
terraced into a ladder that spins
into a blade of light, and drugs the darkness
with its brilliant stem.
Desire smiles in all directions at once.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram recounts a memorable experience. Stepping out of a hut in Bali built on stilts above rice paddies, he finds himself acutely disoriented, with “no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling away forever”:
I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it—the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely : between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies (4).
~
I went out on my cabin porch,
And looked up through the black forest
At the swaying islands of stars.
Suddenly I saw at my feet,
Spread on the floor of night, ingots
Of quivering phosphorescence,
And all about were scattered chips
Of pale cold light that was alive.
~
‘the shape of heaven is as confused
as the heart when you place
your feet on your head, you will
stand on the stars,’
these words whisper as the sea folds
a thousand forms
~
The vast onion of the actual:
History seeping from capsule
To capsule, from periphery
To center, and outward again …
The sparkling quanta of events,
The pulsing wave motion of value …
Among its other labors, the old lore facilitated imaginal placement as a coordination of mind and map, psychodynamics and geophysics posing together in astronomical apparel. In the account by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, star lore of the pole as it guides the equinoctial routes around the four corners of the circulating earth is regionally encoded in myths around the world. C. G. Jung recognized this in his consideration of Naassene creed:
The Original Man in his latent state—so we would interpret the term axarak-teristos—is named Aipolos… because he is aepolos, the Pole that turns the cosmos round. This recalls the parallel ideas of the alchemists … about Mercurius, who is found at the North Pole. Similarly the Naassenes named Aipolos—in the language of the Odyssey—Proteus… “who owes allegiance to Poseidon and knows the sea in all its depths.” (Aion, 216)
Through such burrowings in the compost library we begin to glimpse an ecological import in mythic lore, which makes a point of recalling and imagining a world of profundities exceeding comprehension. Gods are the humanized manifestation of the unknowable, even as their behavior makes sounds audible to humans like that “wise tomcat” who tells tales when climbing the equinoctial pole and sings songs when he slides down it.
The Archanthropos is the Logos, whom the souls follow “twittering,” as the bats follow Hermes in the nekyia. He leads them to Oceanus and—in the immortal words of Homer—to “the doors of Helios and the land of dreams.” “He (Hermes) is Oceanus, the begetter of gods and men, ever ebbing and flowing, now forth, now back.” Men are born from the ebb, and gods from the flow. (Aion, 209)
I read this passage as a charter of compost poetry, from Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”—its “spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, / The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe”—to Pound’s nekyia, his descent through sediments of text down to the tale as bedrock, Odysseus in the underworld; to Olson’s Maximus as Archanthropos, whose eyes also look out to sea, “Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood” (hearkening back to Whitman’s “fish-shape Paumanok where I was born”). These are all figures who follow a logos in their poetry, twittering, to ocean as literal place and Okeanos as imaginal location.
Okeanos, R. B. Onians reports, “was believed to be a bond around the earth, apparently of serpent form even as Acheloos, the primal river or water, was conceived as a serpent with human head and horns. The procreative element in any body was the psyche, which appeared in the form of a serpent. Okeanos was … the primal psyche and thus might be conceived as a serpent in relation to procreative liquid. The conception of Okeanos has no basis in observation. It can now be explained as the imagined primal cosmic psyche or procreative power, liquid and serpent. The name appears to have been borrowed from the Semites (?Phoenicians) and to mean ‘circling’” (Origins of European Thought, 248–49).* Amulets, bracelets, necklaces, tokens, and crowns are archaic symbols of this encompassing world, signs of submission to sublunar existence in a cosmos encircled by chaos, that serpentine perimeter of the incomprehensible, the unmanageable, the nonhuman. Against the harmonic ratios of an ideal “ichnography,”† psyche is a personal stain, a portable speck of chaos, a gleaming scale of the ouroboros.
There is something more that speaks in this image. If psyche is partial chaos, it is also partial ocean, in touch with procreation and the ecological circulation of elements. Psyche itself becomes the ocean of wisdom and tact spans the human world as the oceans of water span the globe. Greek lore provides images of this : Okeanos, Proteus, Kronos, Pan—all images of All, as Pan’s name translates; figures of totality, serving individually as autonomous figures in the pantheon, and collectively as a heraldic display of psyche cosmetized or “made up.” Could it be that the Greeks imagined themselves distinct from what they called the barbarians because they conceived an inner circumference to the surrounding chaos, a realm of human sapience that could absorb and pacify that chaos, or could at least be known (both as ocean and as old lore) as the only feasible transportation route through the life of a community in time—and that, in its essential nature, the species itself was not distinct from chaos but was its inner circumference, psyche tight against it as the satyr-play to the three tragedies it accompanied?
Plot as “first principle” for Aristotle was “arrangement of the incidents” but also the “soul of tragedy” (Poetics, VI); and, as Robin Blaser adds, the logos or discourse of emplotment means “running around arranging / things, ourselves among them.”
action is, perhaps, the magnitude
of the body
the stain of form
turning among the
marriage clothes
the starry issue
the horizon
the beauty
and terror composed inextricably mingled
in an unfixed freedom
Beauty and terror define the “soul of tragedy.” The Greeks built their tragedies on hubris, as heroes like Oedipus prove incapable of realizing the truth of their fates written in the stars. Through these tragedies we glean the cost of the Greco-Roman embrace of alphabetic literacy and the corresponding lapse of star and ocean lore, those archaically disseminated universal codes—the “strange hologram of archaic cosmology” documented in Hamlet’s Mill (Santillana, 346). “Bits of it reach us in unusual, hesitant form,” Santillana writes, “in the wisdom and sketches of Griaule’s teacher Ogotemmeli, the blind centenarian sage. In the magic drawings of Lascaux, or in American Indian tales, one perceives a mysterious understanding between men and other living creatures which bespeaks relationships beyond our imagination, infinitely remote from our analytical capacity” (347). Confronting the loss of this great “Star Menagerie,” we might envision our entire acknowledged civilization as nothing but a series of adolescent gang-related incidents. To heed Paul Shepard, the consequences of the neglect into which the adolescent threshold has passed may be unbounded (a return to chaos). As with the maintenance of any other delicate prototypes, both adolescence and the old lore are left to chance. Adolescence is the embodiment of enquiry, the flowering and culmination, the volatile eruption of the continuous questioning all childhood has been. Without the interrogative apotheosis of adolescence, a culture loses its questions. Nobody knows what to ask. We’re hard put to know what to make of all the evidence lying around. Squinting into the past and seeing only burly carnivores with clubs is a profound lapse of imagination, a lapse institutionalized in the cartoon milieu of Hanna-Barbera’s cuddly Flintstones. The Greeks as first last men tally with Americans as last first men to breed that monstrance, a civilization whose entire institutional propagation has been riddled with profound lapses of imagination.
Along with the ravaging of natural and human resources in America, there is a corresponding disregard for the American past. We have little dissemination of such basic contradictions to the inherited views as the Bat Creek, Tennessee, Hebrew coins of 100 A.D.; New England engravings in Roman Numerals indicating adherence to Sosigene’s calendric reforms of 45 B.C; or traces of an ancient Libyan alphabet in the Virgin Islands. Where go for such news but to the poets?
The impatient dead go out announcing
their immersions, dots
and doublespiraling crescents
etched
eventually as far north as
Nova Scotia … *
~
Libyans and Egyptians entered the Mississippi from the Gulf
penetrated to Iowa, the Dakotas
and westward along the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers, the
Oklahoma-Colorado border
Celts in the rivermouths of New England, North Africans in the
heartland of the continent, centuries before Christ
~
So the Jews, we now
from Tennessee inscriptions
guess again the Indians the lost
ten tribes, may have run
that whole economy, the blood
line, equally black
say, under my fingernail
a crescent the fertility
of that ancient money touch
become the thread
of absolutely unambiguous
felt Direction
so to the Mystery … *
In Kenneth Irby’s poem, by sheer office of high school yearning Jesus steps off the train in Fort Scott, Kansas. History and cosmology overlap. One might come to know something about the Bar Kochba coins of Tennessee by folding them into imagination : “invagination,” Olson would call it shortly before he died (punning desperately, it seems, on his failed liver as Lady Live Her, undergoing a gender reorientation in the process†). In the late Maximus Olson comes to a view arrived at independently by Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill: that the mythic encoding of astrological lore records a catastrophe in the shift of the ecliptic and the crisis of a new pole star each astrological era. In its balanced phase, “‘earth’ is the ideal plane going through the four points of the year, the equinoxes and the solstices” (Hamlet’s Mill, 62). It’s the same plane to which we make reference even now, as last first men, gone laterally out to the tip Indo-European migration routes have tended toward, America, where “Having come Far West, the musculature reflected another climate than Old World or Atlantean, a shifting around of the magnetic poles, widely rearranging the felt directional lines of force.” These momentous excursions into the old lore come full tilt at the end of Irby’s “Delius”:
A band of seduction, about to fall off the continent
certainly not the East getting home
beyond Sacramento is the essential roughage of the Western edge unsettling a magnetic intestinal pole track
bloodred in the sky as the Spider Woman of the North and South fades away, sustained in the, only in the
what man has matured as a creature of, ice
the Climatology of Attention is not the Extension of Empire
an Elephant palm we might say, nursing its dying with a nuzzling trunk to reach the stars
Deneb in the Swan over Bolinas the umbrella of an unquenchable reach
the drunken Strangers of the Earth stumbling into each other’s arms falling off the road to
find their way back to that barely remembered home
in the hills the Leader of the Wind holds up a painted hand
pecked like a petroglyph into the rock
the Entry Sign upon the fallen shelf
down the stream bed of all many-colored rocks
leading the Wind that holds Direction
“to find a new vocabulary”
the Moki feather cloak
“hovering on the verge”
“so we must look not at the mound underfoot, but at the starry horizon”
for “the soul knows itself, and would live its own life.”
And what it would know as its own is not exempted from the farthest ravishment of astronomic fermentation:
Nebula, whirlpool, mist & cloud; knotted, asymmetrical branchings
formed like a labyrinth
—are form, even as a sphere, crystal
& flower.
‘Patterns
are temporary boundaries’…
And Orpheus, the metamorphosis
before us
of coral,
acanthus,
For ‘where the figure is, the answer is.’