Myth of Arrival

Dylan Thomas, "When the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing/ The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind."

Howard Moss, "The senseless drowned/ Have faces nobody would care to see,/ But water loves those gradual erasures/ Of flesh and shoreline, greenery and glass … Grown onto every inch of plate, except/ Where the hinges let it move, were living things,/ Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one/ Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:/ The origins of art."

William Shakespeare, "O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,/ What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!/ What sights of ugly death within my eyes!"

What happens to the drowned? It's amazing how primordial our beliefs that only those whose bodies we can bury receive _______________ (insert whatever your religion or belief or hang-up concerning "the afterlife" here) while those who are lost at sea never rest. It seems to be an universal belief.

Drowning fascinates me; not my own belief in it, but the belief of others, how they see themselves in conjunction with the unspeakable power of the ocean.¹ To drown in the sea is to be literally swallowed up, gone forever, vanished. John Rousmaniere echoes this when he wrote: "I think that when people are lost in a storm, there is that absence of a body. It is an elemental need to have a body, or you are literally lost."

When you consider the writers, actors, musicians and poets who've either killed themselves or been killed by asphyxiation it gives one pause. I found this list on Wikipedia then added a few of my own:

Percy Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy;

Virgina Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse;

Paul Celan killed himself by drowning in the Seine river in Paris;

Hart Crane threw himself into the Gulf of Mexico, heading home to New York City;

Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of the mathematician Pythagoras, drowned by his master for the imprudence of discovering irrational numbers;

Qu Yuan of China in 278 BC. Committed ritual suicide as a form of protest against the corruption of the era, a sacrifice still commemorated today during the Duan Wu or Dragon Boat Festival;

Antinous (born circa 111), lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile in 130;

Li Bai, Chinese poet, as legend has it he fell overboard when he drunkenly tried to embrace the image of the moon on the water;

Natalie Wood (born 1938), actress, drowned in a yacht accident in 1981; the accident raised several suspicions and murder was considered;

Alfonsina Storni, pioneering feminist, poet and journalist, committed suicide at La Perla beach near Mar del Plata, Argentina;

Carol Wayne, American actress who drowned under mysterious circumstances in Manzanillo, Mexico in 1985;

Jeff Buckley (born 1966), singer-songwriter, drowned in the Wolf River in 1997;

Spalding Gray, monologuist and actor (Swimming to Cambodia), born 1941, suspected suicide in New York City's East River;

Similarly, poet seem to have a macabre fascination concerning the drowned. The list of drowning poems alone is impressive: "Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame," "A Ritual of Drowning," "Hymns for the Drowning," "Music While Drowning," "The Art of Drowning," "The Act of Drowning," "Not Waving But Drowning" and the poet Denver Butson even has his own "Drowning Ghazals.: And now to that list I add one more:

I need to call, I need to stamp, I need
to do something; your body is missing,
submerging completely. Your mouth filling,
your lungs filling. You'll never be wormseed
now, you hungry ghost. Even dull seaweed
shuns you and seaweed is everyone's friend.
I would call you back if I could depend
on you hearing me. Not your greed, the greed
of all those bones missing, for land, for this
body of mine. Do not come back for that.
I am not Odysseus, his siren,
nor the siren's song. Still I call. What bliss
is there in death if no one prayers down at
the shore? Love, come back from oblivion.

1. Folktales, religious rites, customs and superstitions about drowning and the drowned from around the world could easily fill and entire book. Here is a sampling I found:

   Sternberg says the Chukchee of Siberia believe that their, "Clan-gods … are the spirits of clansmen who have died by drowning or fire."

   In Eastern Europe the Rusalki were water spirits, found in both Slavonic and Russian mythology. Supposedly they were the spirits of drowned girls. In other parts of Europe it was a common held belief that, "when a man is drowning it is the intention of the gods that he should be drowned; and that the rescuer, if successful in rescuing him, must be the substitute and be drowned himself later on." In a similar line of thought, one source claims "a gold earring was both a charm against drowning and the price paid to Davy Jones to enter the next world if a sailor died at sea."

   In China, a festival known as Teng Chieh, serves two functions: "As a remembrance of the dead and in order to free the spirits of the "pretas" in order that they might ascend to heaven. "Pretas" are the spirits of those who died as a result of drowning and whose bodies were consequently never buried. The presence of "pretas" among the living is thought by the Chinese to be dangerous. Under the guidance of Buddhist temples, societies are formed to carry out ceremonies for the "pretas," which includes the lighting of lanterns. Monks are invited to recite sacred verses and offerings of fruit are presented."

   There is a similar festival, I believe, in Japan. "These lanterns are to send away the spirits of those who died of drowning. It is believed that these spirits, 'drowned ghosts,' will suffer in the water until someone else comes to take their place … it is thought that many people have died by drowning simply because they were pulled into the water by ghosts who were eager to find a substitute for their suffering." [back]

I was browsing through the latest edition of Discover Magazine and stumbled upon a fascinating article by John Horgan entitled "The God Experiment," which asked this question: Suppose scientists found a way to give us permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence. Would we want that power?

Hell, yes! I cried, upsetting several customers in line with me at the Quick-ee Mart. I quote only part of the article here (it's worth the whole read) but this information boggles my mind:

Rick Strassman … a psychiatrist in New Mexico, traces spirituality to a single compound, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Strassman proposes that DMT secreted by our own brains plays a profound role in human consciousness. Specifically, he hypothesizes that endogenous DMT triggers mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.

First synthesized by a Canadian chemist in 1931, DMT is the primary active ingredient of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea ingested as a sacrament by Amazonian Indians and by members of two churches in Brazil. (Although DMT is a controlled substance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that members of a church in New Mexico can ingest ayahuasca for religious purposes.) Pure DMT normally has no effect when consumed orally, because an enzyme in the gut renders it inactive. But in the 1950s Stephen Szara, a Hungarian chemist who later worked for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, discovered that when injected, DMT triggers an extremely powerful hallucinogenic trip lasting less than an hour.

Like the classic psychedelic compounds LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, DMT resembles neurotransmitters such as serotonin. But what makes DMT unique among the known psychedelics is that trace amounts of it naturally occur in the human body. Scientists first isolated DMT in human blood in 1965, and in 1972 a group led by the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health detected the compound in human brain tissue.

These discoveries led to speculation that endogenous DMT—perhaps produced in excess or improperly regulated by the body—contributes to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. By the early 1980s, the DMT theory of psychosis was largely abandoned when psychedelic research involving humans became too controversial. But in 1990, arguing that DMT merited further investigation, Strassman obtained permission from federal authorities to inject the drug into human volunteers.

A Zen Buddhist, Strassman was intrigued by the possibility that endogenous DMT plays a role in triggering mystical experiences. He suspected that DMT might be produced in the pineal gland, a minute organ nestled deep in the brain. The pineal gland abounds both in chemical precursors of DMT, such as tryptophan, and in beta-carbolines, the same compounds that render DMT orally active in the South American brew ayahuasca by counteracting the enzyme in the gut that breaks down DMT. From 1990 to 1995, Strassman supervised more than 400 DMT sessions involving 60 volunteers at the University of New Mexico. These were the first sanctioned psychedelic experiments involving human subjects in the United States since the mid-1970s.

To a certain extent, the DMT sessions fulfilled Strassman's expectations. Many of his subjects reported quasi-religious sensations of bliss, ineffability, timelessness, and reconciliation of opposites; a certainty that consciousness continues after death of the body; and contact with "a supremely powerful, wise, and loving presence." Others underwent classic near-death experiences, feeling themselves leaving their bodies and moving through a tunnel toward a radiant light.

Volunteers also reported visions that did not fit neatly into Strassman's scientific or spiritual worldview, however. Forty-seven percent encountered otherworldly beings, variously described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or "entities" that defied description. These bizarre beings were not always friendly. One of Strassman's subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures. In part out of concern about this negative experience, Strassman discontinued his research.

However, on page 56, there is a photograph of a yellow motorcycle helmet, the sort popular in 1970s Disney action movies (think: Condorman) with the following caption: Neurobiologist Michael Persinger has devised a wired helmet that he says induces religious experiences in those who wear it. Zounds! no more boring trips into the Mexican wilderness to hunt for peyote! No more glue sniffing! No more licking the glow - in - the - dark chemicals off the back of those cheap stars you get at planetariums!

Still, all joking aside, what fascinates me still is the idea of having the Divine¹ flow through me and be able to actually do something with it — for the most part I simply pass out when Spirit enters and my friends tell me what happened much later. This, though, would let me channel all that energy into a sharp point. I suppose dimethyltryptamine, like anything, runs the danger of overuse, dependency, abuse; and I have the potential of being a terribly addictive person when left unchecked. It's one reason I gave up drinking. Perhaps, perhaps, if DMT had been used by more people, the old gods wouldn't have died out. Not everyone is a channel and even those who might be are also bound by their culture and time period to believe in only certain things. On the other hand, it probably would cut down on the self-righteousness I usually attribute to major religions. The poet Lucille Clifton said of receiving her own communication from beyond, or "gifts" as she calls them: "if the most righteous people were receiving gifts [instead of the humble] it would be much easier."

And at twilight he sacrificed
me, small thing, I had banished
him for some petty evil but he
returned as he always returns.

Ai!, to hear his Ave Maria makes
me want to leave all this indomitable
chastity, your halfhearted sex so
I shivered with pleasure watching
those muscled thighs, that broken
wobble from yellow fever, typhus,
the tools of his trade. Of course,

I clasped the monster to my
breast, expanding, scalding,
there was that terrible scorching
as he plunged, withdrew to
plunge again, let there be pain,

I confided in his pale, feral
ear. A laugh in the darkness
and a warm summer breeze
I burst, mouth over me, tongue
inside; flame, a libation, flame
and jewels, flame a
flower. Just like that.

1. I have never been comfortable with the limiting words we have in English to describe transcendence. I can talk vaguely about the sensations but in the end I fall back on cliched contemporary Judea-Christian words (Spirit, Divine, etc.) Being neither Christian nor believing in a monotheist male god leaves me at a bit of disadvantage but what can I do? I simply don't know what else to call these states of being. [back]

In the primordial mud of
existence, an exhumed doll,
a miraculated body soaked
with tears
– Michel Nedjar

I love me some myth! I had this dream last night of a classical Greek woman being judged in the underworld. This morning I began to think of the myth of Sappho, the 10th Muse, and what we really knew of her. How much recorded information is there? Which artists have tried to capture her? I had this dim memory I had seen a painting of Sappho by the English painter John Waterhouse, but then I remembered it was about the Narrisus myth instead. While looking, however, I stumbled on a website hosted by Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love, who has many, many observations about narcissists and burdens they pose for others (here I should make some witty comment about Tony Hoagland's new book, What Narcissism Means to Me, but I won't). There are many days when I feel I suffer from narcissism and then there are long periods of time when it doesn't even enter my head, so who really knows? However, in the website there was a section concerning narcissism and the artist that caught my eye. I quote part of it here:

A narcissist would find it difficult to enjoy the emotional content, message and context of a work of art. This is because narcissists lack empathy. They are unable to put themselves in other people's "shoes". They are like islands with all lines of communications cut, with giant mirrors in which the islanders are reflected.

Producing a work of art IS working to the benefit of mankind. Does a narcissistic artist INTEND to benefit mankind with his work? To this the answer is an unequivocal NO. The narcissist is interested ONLY in ONE thing: narcissistic supply. If he can obtain it by creating art — he will. It's simply another way of obtaining his drug. In most cases, he is not even emotionally involved in what he does.

What was interesting to me was the line, "producing a work of art IS working to the benefit of mankind." The more I thought about it the more I liked the statement, even if, I think, it argues against something I wrote yesterday (and I stand corrected on) concerning contemporaneous, instant, on the spot poetry. As long as we keep creating, pushing forward, there was no shame in doing whatever brought you bliss. Sort of like Sappho in the court of the dead, singing songs lost forever to us. Making the dead cry with such beauty. One day I too want to make the dead cry. I want to sing so even the boulders and trees draw near to hear my song.

Ah, Sappho, where are you, my friend, a body soaked with tears? Write soon, I miss you …

There are places where I will
never go to, Boston, say,
where no one ever lives
and if no one lives what's the point

of factories or tribes or tabloids?
Only night and lark symbolism
there is always that, sky lark:
blood of my tribe, let the tribe of
my blood come to an end down
around the waterfront and

factory and small hotel
where I shall meet you, sitting
by an open window, watching
men and women go about
their labors, we all labor over
so much, some tit of toy or

hardware or postage stamp,
I'd like a postage stamp of you,
turning to water, moving
into this familiar form,
I've always known, the one

I love. There are so many bodies
all dumb and wet from birth; clove-
hoofed men and men and men and
men and air-tangled women and
everyone hitting puberty

and those stupid calves you see
in documentaries; we turn now
to the calf and its membrane,
its veil, birthing veil, now
we breath. Now we lick

back wet hair, the green sap
of these things, gather the stick
limbs up, rise we shall rise
those first few terrible miles
coaxing you to move to be

a little more indivisible all
rubbery and new and smiling
you got to be smiling arms out
like so — so you can look back
and say for me,

all of this is for me.

A friend of mine recently posted this question on her Poetrywithmeaning blog and it got me thinking about the age old debate of the poet in society:

There was a time when poets used to be sought after, to be a poet was a great thing and many admired this in you. But I fear those days are now gone for we whom strive to keep what is near and dear to us alive, poetry, is now little fame or even acknowledgment. Why, has the world turned into such a evil place that we no longer hold a worth unless it is of death and destruction?

The manifesto from their website that gave me pause, however, was: all poetry means something … true enough, but is simply "meaning something" enough? I do not wish to get bogged down into pointless argument over which school of poetry "is more real" than another or whether you can call yourself a "poet" if you don't rhyme or any of the other time-wasting debates I have read in so many blogs of late. I think it is symbolic that we, a nation of poets, spend more time back-stabbing and fighting over who is "real" than doing any serious writing; we are a nation giving away our voices.

To me poetry, all poetry, is all praise and it's all right¹ and that's the end of the argument. Or, to put it slightly differently, I don't care how you say it, it's what you say I care about.

I attempted to answer the question. Here is a snippet of the letter:

[It is] a good question however it is not an easily answered one. First you must ask "what is the purpose of poetry?" If it is to tell a "truth" (whatever that means; truth is a definition filled with so many gray areas as to render it meaningless) then you must ask if it is really poetry that does not earn any respect or is it us, the poets?

Once you get outside academic, middle-class America I would argue that poetry is just as honored as it always was; it all just depends where you come from. Take Europe, for example. Ginsberg talks about being treated like a god when he went there in the 1960s. Poland's Czeslaw Miłosz and Wislawa Szymborska were royalty. Or even closer to home, Pablo Neruda's universal love in the Americas. Or William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens holding court as Modernists.

What is the difference? These were not "professional" poets, these were people who wrote poems but also did other things as well. Neruda held public office, was an ambassador, worked "with the people" who in turn read and loved his words. Williams was a doctor. Stevens sold insurance. The difference is that they were engaged in the world in a way most poets I read today are not.

Neruda’s writes about this in his mind-blowing poem, "El hombre invisible," when he condemns (gently) "mi antiguo hermano," my old graybeard brothers, who only write about themselves. He says:

siempre dicen "yo,"
a cada paso
les sucede algo,
es siempre "yo,"
por las calles
sólo ellos andan
o la dulce que aman,
nadie más,
no pasan pescadores,
ni libreros,
no pasan albañiles,
nadie se cae
de un andamio,
nadie sufre,
nadie ama,
sólo mi pobre hermano,
el poeta,
a él le pasan
todas las cosas
y a su dulce querida,
nadie vive
sino él solo,
nadie llora de hambre
o de ira,
nadie sufre em sus versos
porque no puede
pagar el alquiler,
a nadie en poesía
echan a la calle
con camas y con sillas

…

hay huelgas,
vienen soldados,
disparan,
disparan contra el pueblo,
es decir,
contra la poesía,
y mi hermano …

for they always say "I,"
every where they go
something occurs
and it is always "I,"
down these streets,
only they
or their beloved,
walk down these streets,
no one else,
there are no fishermen about,
no bookstore merchants,
no bricklayers walking about,
no one stumbles and falls
from their scaffolding,
not one person suffers,
not one person loves,
only my poor brother,
the poet,
everything is happen
to him
and to his beloved,
no one lives
but him, the solitary poet,
no one weeps from hunger
or anger,
not one person suffers
in all his poetry
because he was unable
to pay the rent,
not one person
in all his poetry
is evicted from his house
with everything he owns,

…

there is a worker's strike,
military police arrive
and open fire,
they fire upon the people,
which is also to say,
against poetry …

(the translation is mine, I am sorry for my poor Spanish skills) However, if there is blame that no one is listening to us then it falls completely on the shoulders of the poet and not the audience. Who is saying the important things right now? We have a genocide going on and where are our poets condemning that? Why is it when I open Poetry Magazine or APR I think our pretty poets are living on the moon for all the worldly events they deal with. I do not mean we aren't writing poetry. Everyone, it seems, is writing. What I am looking for are poets who still remember they are citizens; poets who go out, roll up their sleeves, fight and die for what what they believe in instead of giving lip service to vague ideas they have never experienced first hand.

"Oh, wait," you say, "fighting and dying? Oh no, I won't die for poetry, which is to say, the people … that's not what poetry is about" — and there you have it, my friend, that is why today's poetry can be, but doesn't necessarily need to be, seen as so utterly irrelevant by so many of us.

I usually do not comment on my own images I make and post here. But today I will. These men are at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. They are about to be executed as men and women and children right now, as you read this, are about to be executed. And the glorious poet in the foreground, Apollo or Diana or some other radiating figure we blow to mythic proportions and think they will save the world from evil, does what? Sing about failed love? about their iPod? about their mean-spirited parents? Where were the safe American poets writing their safe American outrage about the fate of these men and women and children in 1938 Europe? about all the genocide that has just happened in the last 100 years in Australia? in Congo? the Philippines? in Poland-Lithuania? All across Soviet Russia? in Croatia? under Nazi controlled Europe? in South-West Africa? in China? Japan's treatment of Korea? Ottoman control over Armenia? in Bangladesh? in Burundi? in Cambodia? in East Timor? now Afghanistan? now Iraq? in Rwanda? in Bosnia? in Sudan?

Our poets were, then and now, safe and at home and not getting their pretty hands dirty.

And now we have Darfur. And every day it continues: they fire upon the people,/ which is also to say,/ against poetry … and so my fine poets, what are we going to do about it? Shall I make another picture in one year and title it: "prisoners at darfur awaiting execution: and where were you my fine poet?" … and where will we all be in a year? and what were we all doing?

1. I take that line from Rumi when Moses learns: "You have separated Me from one of My own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite, or to sever? I have given each being a separate and unique way of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge. What seems wrong to you is right for him. What is poison to one is honey to someone else. Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship, these mean nothing to Me. I am apart from all that. Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do. It's all praise, it's all right. It's not Me that's glorified in acts of worship. It's the worshipers! I don't hear the words they say. I look inside at the humility. The broken-open lowliness is the Reality, not the language! Forget phraseology, I want burning, burning . . . . burn up your thinking and forms of expression! Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who burn are another."

   … Yes, I want a nation of burning … [back]

Gentleness, sacrifice, devotion; when I was younger and trying to teach myself humility I'd play a little game. Regardless of where I was — grocery line check-out, library, bookstore — I'd ask myself: "what if the person standing in front of me was my teacher? my elder? and I need to learn something fundamentally, life savingly, important from them?" It would thus become a question of how I would treat that person, regardless of race or gender or age, differently than if they were a stranger.

Looking back, I see it was sort of a sad game, really. I never found the teachers I so desperately needed; I've never had an elder like that except in vague ways, like from books and that is not the same … if you could have one teacher from all history (living or dead does not matter) who would it be? Who would you call Captain, O my Captain? Whose flag would you fly going into the last, great battle?

For me, the current Pofessor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Angela Y. Davis, is the elder I wish I had. Davis' Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998) should be required reading everywhere. She once said:

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Yes, yes, yes, I think we can all learn something vast and important from her. Something life savingly important.

Before the "I" in riot, before
the "am" in bedlam, as in, "I
am a riot," you forgot, yes
you did, how hard it was
to follow. Has obedience ever
left any of us lucid and happy
and stranded? Ever? It's
the same when a pulse comes
to an end, or a government
falls and people say O they knew
it was a mistake, that everybody
says it'd never work. O to know
like everyone knows. What duties
of the flesh are there? We fight
for the soul all the time yes,
the soul, always the soul — & general,
if I do not follow you word by
word? then let my flesh hide
but O delight, if I follow you, into
shaming obedience, word by
word, my teacher, word by word,
why would either of us ever bother
to hide again? Either of us?