A Visit from Hart Crane

As I sat adoring Les Eyzies’ limestone cliffs, Crane began to speak: “The shark that ate me was not a hammerhead but a self-savaging cruising the hunger-filled waters of North American soul. But you may imagine my light topcoat twisted around a shark, as if it were a Rodin Balzac, wearing my coat as a cloak, on a rise of the ocean floor below the Orizaba that 1932 noon. There is an image for our Midwestern souls! To offer it, I had to abandon my work on Hermaphroditus, which involved constantly circulating between ‘male’ and ‘female’ poles—the man as double of the woman, the woman as double of the man, a roller-rink my soul glided, never racing to win until it woke into poetry and faced those monsters: the Covering Patriarch and the Cherub of Narcissism, ‘guardians’ of that hole between desire and its fulfillment. The Cherub is an infantilization of the soul, helpless crying, abandoned in the grotto the Patriarch ‘covers,’ in mockery of the cobra spreading over meditating Gautama, his ally and root support from depths in which serpent and person are daemonically entangled, where images are winding windows and I am loosed in that pattern that Zinsser and I spoke of…”

His voice faded and I momentarily lost him in geographical confusion: did Zinsser offer his prophecy to Crane at that point in ocean later recrossed with Peggy Cowley? Somehow “loose yourself within a pattern’s mastery or go on to undeserved doom” seems the locus of Crane’s leap, the noon after the day he tried to lose Peggy in Havana. They were to meet in a restaurant—Crane (according to Cowley) never showed up. Perhaps some part of him wanted to abandon her there and to sail on without her—but she made her way back to the ship. What has this to do with his suicide? For years I thought that after connecting with a woman, Crane discovered he could not maintain the connection—that he was doomed in spite of having been given “the independence of my mind and soul again, and perhaps a real wholeness to my body”—doomed again and again to drunkenly seek merger with himself in the figure of an alien man, that in spite of any woman the old pattern would reassert itself. That is why he leapt. In my dream last night, Crane was intact—though only 2 inches tall, reclining on a glass shelf in what appeared to be the Hart Crane Museum, a homunculus in the muse of my dream, homunculus and muse, a merger.

“No,” he spoke again, “I could have continued my work for years, could have been thrashed until old age, lost my ears, even my organs, had not the ‘connection’ as you call it with Cowley polarized my work into clearly male and female opposites. The spectre of fulfillment, of gratification, is intolerable. Those of us who wind about the never-finished Hermaphroditic body cannot tolerate that sensation of birth that swings like massive vulvular bells through heterosexual intercourse. Its sensation, joyful and corrugated with dread, lifted my tower from a sunless workable gloom into a daylit presence and in that moment it snapped in two. It was my natal daemon, covered with the vermin of our Midwestern compulsion to realize ourselves in heterosexual intercourse, that drove me before death’s altar in that land where more than one gringo has gone to exercise his skeleton. I went to the stern trying to understand why I had said goodbye to her, why all my life I had been saying goodbye to that hideous belltower whose breasts in a phallic retort were compacted in the face of things—in the human expression of a snake, in the serpentine look of a man. My man in Havana, my man in Hell, my white serpent father whose breasts I failed to draw forth. I stood by the rail and stared into the filth that had driven and sustained me. Suddenly everything stopped. I was out of time in the fortress of the Cherub. The Orizabawas perched on one very tall rotten wave and, as if miles below, a dazzling light appeared, as if this were my ‘opening night,’ as if to die is ‘World Premiere.’ And then the Cherub of Narcissism was at my ear: ‘You are no further along your path than in the instant when you were conceived. You are merely my play, which I re-stage and re-celebrate with limousines and furs.’ And the Covering Patriarch hissed: ‘It makes no difference how you carry on—we’ll only talk about you when you’re gone.’ I hurled myself into that mindless ditty, to shatter its lantern mockery, its sinister pointing out to the night that ‘the real show’ is bodies winding out those plush caves in which psyche is, in fact, to be bled…”

He paused long enough for me to ask: your Dionysus, with a Nazarene core, is a full company of bit parts as he flames and sparks at the stake. In what sense is his “target smile” “unmangled?”

“The ‘I’ must go unpruned and be allowed to elaborate its tendrils. Since I could not ‘shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,’ I sought a Hermaphroditic grafting. I refused my parents’ nature in favor of a vision that included crucifixion and pagan multiplicity. Dionysus never was mangled—his being takes place in parts, or minute orders, ‘divine particulars,’ yet ‘the bottom of the sea is cruel.’ For the Protestant, always under curfew, the underworld is infested with criminal elements, thuds of Capone, Manson butt-raped as a child whose later martial hysteria wrote its ‘helter-skelter’ in living flesh. As a Protestant, I was always on that ‘sundered’ leash when I went down into the image hive, but that was part of my vision too: to wander under Dionysus and to suffer Dionysus in the flesh. Because of this I allowed my sense of line to be governed by Tate and Winters. Only the voicings rising in writing I know now are not estrangements. Winters often visits me in this place. In death his soul has become mellow and most open. I see him wandering a nearby vale, chewing peyote, reading Artaud, his flesh neatly stacked on his skull…”

Again he paused, and I caught myself starting to ask: but Hart, how are you? A question I realized would burden him with human relationship—for he was truly neither well nor ailing, but in my hesitation he vanished, to become a resonance in the hanging vines, the red geranium pots, the overarching mimosa whose lime and pink tipped blossoms swayed as if—an “as if” empty enough to enroot the following notion: as poets we are, forever, in Ariadne, divided—divied up, re-quarried, her fodder, thus her dividend, her divided end, a double and. “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing,” voicing reversing voicing, ocean rehearsing the casket that has “always” just tumbled out of our mouths.

                                                                                                                                                                        July 20-21, 1985 , Hotel Centenaire

 

 

                                §

 

 

Three tigers padding about their circus cells
attended by a gypsy whose dirty dead feet,
as if the ankles were nailed, hang crossed.

Unlike apes or people, tigers do not touch the bars,
but turn on the axis of their own boundary marking.

DON’T FORGET THE ANIMALS   the battered tip box commands.

Tonight, in lurid poolroom light,
the tigers will be led through a cage tunnel to earn their keep.

These tigers know their Rilke. A touch of
the blossom of farewell is inherent in their tread.

                             Outside La Flotte, Ile de Ré

 

 

                                §

 

 

Gisants

 

In Nantes, François II curbed & keenly cut
is sculptured white stone, hands pressed in prayer,
like a shark fin cutting the roily cathedral air.
Marguerite de Foix, even more polished, as if oiled,
duplicates his gestures—or is he duplicating M’s?
Two “gisants” in gender duplication, cut to resemble their prayers
to remain!  And to think anyone could be cut from this stone
—by a deeper gouge here, a peasant;
three gouges across the face, a suicide…
In stone resides the potential expression of everyone.

F and M guard themselves with cherubs, a greyhound, angels.
They know, as they cruise the nave, how arbitrary their rule was.
How their hunger to be remembered must be reinforced by
our hunger
    to step inside their temenos,
and swim with them in spirit,   carnivorous,   nuptial,
the organ throbbing against the organs of the worshippers
    at attention,
                         as they too make and unmake
shark fins with their upended end-facing hands.

                                          Cathédrale St.-Pierre et St.-Paul

 

 

                                §

 

 

Figurehead

 

To enter the 2nd floor gallery of the Maritime Museum
is to be stopped by a thirteen-foot woman.

                               “A tempest liberated me.
from dragging across the ocean floor
the left side of my body was torn apart,
my forearms snapped off.  I freed myself, surfaced
on the beach of Tharon, 1920.
                                                    You see where the sailors touched me
after licking their fingers before boarding.
Thousands of fingers wore my yoni away
so that you, fresh pilgrim,
if you have the nerve, may thrust your finger deep
  into my touch-hole… But ‘good luck’
    for what? Pity for those baking tins of blacks
      fitted in spoonwise behind me,
        pity for their shackle-
          raped wrists.

               Here, with bleached African tiara,
               teredo-riddled stumps,
               I greet you.”

                                    Nantes

 

 

                                §

 

 

Sunday, 10 PM. Part of our hotel room projects into Nantes, a tender lampshade half floating in the rain-spotted air. Mush of wheels on Place Duchesse Anne. A yellow ambulance peers through. Cobblestones Spinoza-near, gleaming nailheads, “eternal,” Freud-near. Spanked into the distance a huge caterpillar grazes rue du Château, disappears into its own feet. You rest in bed reading Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good. Clouds of infant curiosity, the building force, close in on you. What did happen at 0? At 1? Only the infant could report his fish bowl experience with his massive Belgian mother, the scabbard hand of her Watusi daddy. The “roles” are EYES in the head of owl Minerva, wisdom an interior shrine—but always within sound of the clashing, smashing child gates…

     White tar in drying black luminescence…
           Ah the old pond
                                           One can understand why it persists—
           to know in furu ike
                   that frog and plop
              are predictable, and good,
              of course, ah!  Before or after
                  old pond…

Now after breakfast, writing in the dimly-lit nook:  A new man in the office. Another man and a woman employee saw him go to into the bathroom with an erection, so they sent a new woman employee in to have sex with him there. She was to report to the other employees, but instead she and the man fell in love and made love all the time. One day the man was called into the office of the other two employees and told that he was fired. He was outraged, for he’d done nothing wrong. He found out that he had been filmed with other employees, all of whom, except him, made awful faces and noises when asked about love. Only he had affirmed love. “And you’re going to fire me for that?” Then his lover came in and introduced him to a new woman employee. “I think she can be of great help to us,” his lover said. So the man went with the new woman employee into another office. Finding each other attractive, they decided to have sex. He began to finger her and found that she had a string hanging out of her vagina—at this point I began to come and ejaculated very slowly.

As I woke, I recalled a dream before this one: my mother was lying down and rubbing her breasts with ice cubes. I asked her if I might do that for her. As I was rubbing her very small breasts with ice, I realized that I was rubbing her with my initials and that we had been having intercourse for years, and how strange it was that anyone would think there was anything wrong with this. She smiled at me—was about sixty, aging but very attractive. I then recalled Olson’s obsession in “The Song of Ullikummi,” with Kumarbi fucking the “huge rock” (as well as Olson’s retelling of the Algonquin myth of the woman who “marries” the mountain); at this moment, it seemed clearly Oedipal, and that whenever there is a hero having intercourse with a big impersonal force, it is probably Oedipal. I then recalled that I had been repeating, over and over, for the past several days: “He does not negate anymore,” a phrase which I associated with Dionysus. I had been asking the god to release me from negation (specifically, criticism of others, especially of Caryl). I had come to feel that what I had needed to learn via negation had been learned, and that negation could now be abandoned.

I fell asleep again and found myself driving an old car with a compliated gear shift, which was very tall and went way up, nearly to the roof of he car when I put it in 2nd gear. A man came to look at the car and explained the marvelous gear shift. He tried to work it and the window broke…

Then Caryl and I were living in a large house in which M and his family, as well as M’s brother and his family, were living. Caryl left, and both men took me into their confidence: both had mistresses. The brother kept his in a cocoon-like tent in the cellar. We all got down on our knees to look at her. She was blonde, very pretty, and not disturbed that we were looking at her. I went upstairs and found that M had introduced his children to his mistress. They were all sitting around talking. Caryl returned and I explained what was going on. She said: “We should leave.” I said: Not yet; let’s spend at least the rest of the night here.

Again I awoke and continued to think about incest. It seemed that my mother had been returning ill in dreams for years unsatisfied with my failure to recognize that not only did I desire her but that I had been “in desire” with her for years. And that in being with her in dream all these years I had birthed myself by her and now was my own father. This suggested to me that the “Oedipal project” has not mother as goal, but parthenogenesis, in imitation (male initiation) of the early matriarchal mysteries of birth, when no connection was made between pregnancy and intercourse. Men want to inhabit that power and go through mother to get there. This made me feel that everyman’s goal is mother as gate to pass through into a vision of himself as truly independent—and affirmative? I realized that my desire to end negation had been set in motion by feelings in the early 1970s:  having loved Caryl and having been loved fully by her, I could happily die now. To accept dying and to abandon negation seemed yoked, a double perspective that would enable the soul to have a lot of room to move around in. So that large house in the last dream has souls in change—fellow inhabitants viewed as living in transition.

 

 

                                §

 

 

(While waiting to order lunch)

Two skeletons entangle my own—
the one of Red Bones is very old, and permeated with matriarchal ochre.
The one of Black Bones is very burnt, and anguished with altar consummation—
(it yearns to be packed & posted by mine of White Bones).
From this triple viewpoint, I am whole, a joke the Triple Goddess tells to
   her selves,
a football huddle of wives whispering of waves and filth, of whales and stills,
for whom each word is a scream, & the spaces between:
iron hooks dangling sirloin and tendon streamers in a granular wind…

                                                                           L’Hôtel, and Auberge du Château

 

 

                                §

 

 

Then I dreamed my way to Henry Miller, who was now the interior guardian of Les Combarelles (not the cave guide, but the guardian who dwells within, who from the outside appears to be caged, but from the inside is the one free of fear). Once we were tucked in the rock, Miller said: “you’ve seen a grown man cry, haven’t you?” Yes, I answered. “Well,” he laughed, “have you ever seen a grown man squeeze his infancy out his eyes?” Then he made his face very round, put his palms against the sides of his head and pushed hard: elephant trunks emerged from each eye and waved around. He released his hold, the trunks withdrew. “When you learn how to do that,” he said, “you won’t have any more problems.”

But seriously, I protested… “Serishly smearishly,” he returned, suddenly fierce. “I offered my 4 year old daughter to a madman once… there was a terrible massacre, but she survived, in fact all my daughters did. Now they tend the suffering boat people stacked like cordwood outside Les Combarelles.”

The last time I saw Miller he was going home, at dusk. He passed by as I was sitting at the side of the road. He had a Howdy Doody expression on his face, and as he passed, I noticed that the back of his head had a face too, a serious, pale, medieval virgin, who spat a shower of pomegranate seeds into my questioning expression.

     PS: I forgot to add that while we were tucked in the rock, Miller also said: “A man’s
     genitals are the culprits of his fate. First they strangle his tongue, then his anus, then
     they withdraw deep into his groin to watch the “light show,” having suspended, as
     decoys, penis and testicles, to mesmerize the women who otherwise might try to save
     him.”

                         End of our journey around the drowned city of Is   

                               St.-Servan-sur-Mer (St.-Malo Sud), 13 August 1985  

 

Our Journey around the Drowned City of Is, a 1985 travel journal kept while visiting the French Dordogne and Brittany regions.