Theft of the Stallion: Pantheist Wisdom of California Poet Robinson Jeffers

A Wild Stallion by Albert Bierstadt

"She endured, and to hasten the act she feigned desire; she had not
for long, except in dream, felt it.
Yesterday's drunkenness made him sluggish and exacting; she
saw, turning her head sadly,
The windows were bright gray with dawn; he embraced her still,
stopping to talk about the stallion.
...
The nerves and the flesh go by shadowlike, the limbs and the lives
shadowlike, these shadows remain, these shadows
To whom temples, to whom churches, to whom labors and wars,
visions and dreams are dedicate...
...
The child Christine waked when her mother left her
And lay half dreaming, in the half-waking dream she saw the
ocean come up out of the west
And cover the world, she looked up through clear water at the
tops of the redwoods." (Roan Stallion by Robinson Jeffers)

I had first become aware of the brilliant illuminations of Robinson Jeffers while listening to the Joseph Campbell lecture, Origins of Man and Myth. Where the poetry of Jeffers is invoked to describe that which makes us human, the affinity for "a divinely superfluous beauty." I also like his Natural Music. Some poetry enthusiasts consider Jeffers' work to be pantheist. In this regard, when I read Jeffers, I indulge in the right road to my relationship with the world, as with that of my mother. Every natural phenomenon calls to a supernatural truth, a divine magic, personified in the ambient face of seasonal change, the drastic force of the weather, or the inner passions ignited. A theme that started this blog currently recurs in my life, that being a recognition of the wayward allure of exceeding exposure to the night so often accompanying life in the northern climes. Yet, after reading such poetic masters as Robinson Jeffers, I can't help think that in the opaque cold of infinite nothingness, there is a mythopoeic field of space, love and silence; the kiss of a goddess in recline.   

More intellectual blogging on Jeffers & Dream

___________

I am a child amid the street market tianguis of Mexico, the grand bazaars of Egypt, and I brush past the singing troubadours of Italy. The air is wild, and my light coat loose. As I glide in and out of various merchants and their wares. I grab a handful of corn, pocket a cookie, and steal away with a sandwich wrap, to enjoy under a youthful sun.

A pretty fair woman by Ferdinand Wagner 

The subtle gate of theft and its freedoms beckon a cause bursting and boiling over within me. I am full with need. The essence of life is stolen away to the fair of justice and the game of life. Still, I scarf down my winnings in jubilee, and return for more. 

_________

A threshed sweat leaf, singled out over the billowing masses,
A high, overstated nocturne

Dreaming in workaholic shivering screams
That transform lightly into breath of song with male weeping

And her deserted lips struggle to purse
Over the citrus flesh of an Iberian mother

Calling for heart chains to unlock
Yet distressed and of unruly mind

She dresses timelessly with prophetic sophistry
Beyond the rasped vocal bead of the Roman elite

Prideful with elegant cheeses to smother their appetite
For lower slavery below the belt of animal sanity

excerpt from "Natural Pleasure"

Goethe and the Existential Life of Modernity

Ginko Biloba, a poem by Goethe

Who are ye that thus rudely banish slumber from my eyes? What mean these vague and insolent glances? Why this fearful procession? With what dream of horror come ye to delude my half awakened soul? Goethe's Egmont, Opening lines of Act V. Scene IV. 

A play about liberty under the thumb of oppression, my preliminary inkling about the Egmont drama is that it forecasts the oppressive momentum that lives within, and supports, heroic independence. I have been contemplating the uniquely liberating present that I experience with my love. American and Vietnamese, we are from two countries whose people, not long ago, brutally killed each other. I wonder sometimes about our extended family relations. How is it possible that the same blood now joined today by love, once was spilt by hatred. As Goethe writes in the poem illustrated above, "Is it but one being single / Which as same itself divides? / Are there two which choose to mingle / So that one each other hides?"

Read my Letter to the Editor "Embracing Diversity" on BlackCoffeePoet 

& See a Collaborative Interview & Essay "Busking and Creative Ecology" by Vi An and myself on In Stereo Press

Previous Post on Goethe: To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

________

I sat under the opaque cloudy open. A dark rain hovered in the misty atmosphere. The pressures of a battered mind fill my eyes with a salivating remorse. I've since exiled myself from a gathering in my city's core. Restless, I fill my mind with blank unease, ass wedged against the wintry pavement of a curb. This area is one of neglect and rage.

Street in Venice by John Singer Sargent

Checking my phone, I have a text. I'm to be on CBC Radio. A talk show host tells me my words are acid and wry. I'm paid. We've settled. The night lingers. I wade in thoughts of a lonely walk. I kill time, staring into the light of my phone. What's it come to? What's the noise? Why do I do this? After raising the question, I feel light enough to carry on. I stand up, and walk. I am a question.

_________

"Falling as a failed lilting feather from a broken wing

Clinging to the unforgiving cold mechanical dawn

Still dreaming an entire civilization

And how illusory, how ultimately disillusioned I am by my youth

Drained of all wicked savagery and raw earth

Into a vegetable gladness

Thawing next to a lone rock

Cracked by a lightning strike from the changeless ice age broth of sky

Almost infinitely long ago, and now rinsed, overly purified by the fresh rains

...

Fathers and mothers in my cultural upbringing
The writers, artists and musicians
Spouting intelligent insanity

From within forms called the book, record, image
All a lie before the transcendent spontaneity of creation from newfound inspiration
To be and do what feels harmonious and complete
...

Finger-pointing to stars and storm clouds
Washing away mud with a healing presence,
A profound humbling that presents power and at once feigns innocence

In departing from all with humility
Yet a fearless flesh-traded mastery over the air,
Stares eyeless into the stoned intuitive rendering"

excerpts from "Contemplation's Itch"

Dream Memory Sketches

Finale by Albin Egger-Lienz

These past few nights, coincidental with the emotional upswing of my transitioning back home, I dream vividly.

Remembered involuntarily, these sketches remain in mind with strong complexities, imprinted with such lucidity as to verify my waking experience of intense questioning.

1

Amid the desert, as drab and steaming with insidious fire as the genocidal, pioneer days of the Australian outback. There is a clamping furor in the air, a dream that dreams in images not only frozen in mind, but in heart, a climbing pull up the mountain of the soul in a delirium of ruthless passion. I wander haphazardly throughout an endless desert at high noon it seems, at high season, unprotected from the ferocious heat. The sun is a deathless predator. I hallucinate the presence of serpents into swords, and I am tunneled into an crime-ridden espionage heatwave in the middle of the Maghrebian deserts of Morocco. In the waving perception, a spackled host of armed thieves rush through my body in and out as if I was one with this burning, naked desert. A snake slithers and at once I am gashed, run through and impaled simultaneously at the sound of a hiss with thin swords resembling how I would imagine heroes of the Arabia to duel. A mental fog is lifted, and I am embedded in a cinematic Casablanca-effect, North African environment. I clamber with hopeless futility in sand-erected surroundings dense with trouble and quick death.

2

A bespectacled retired astronaut, mathematician at NASA and managerial sort of government space programs, clarifies into my vision, a full, bald head with rimless, perfectly circular lenses, covers one eye still with another ocular instrument held by his right hand. He tells me I am to travel to Olympus.

The next moment, I am shot at an immeasurable speed through the atmosphere and far into space through the solar system. I arrive at the destination without hesitation. Time is of no matter.

Arriving on Olympus, which seems to be a lunar satellite of some kind, I enter what appears to be my Grandmother's house in Upstate New York. This is troubling and fascinationg, as I look out of her windows and see the great void of space, smattered with stars over a horizon without an atmosphere.

3

I am walking my bike along a highway in my current city where I currently call home. There behind me, stepping on my shoes, is a homeless man bent on being an obnoxious follower. No matter how hard I try to get onto the bike and continue on my way, I am nearly trampled over by his mysterious presence.

At night, down a dark sidestreet, I suddenly lose my bike, find myself in a scuffle in some suburban bushes and begin to run. There is a great steed, mounted by a medieval knight following my with lance pressed into the windless eve in my direction. Running as fast as I can, I devise a plan while I turn a bend and end up in a backyard which resembles a fortified castle's outer court. Sophisticated narratives of children's stories and escape plots churn wildly inside my mind in the twilight hours of the morning. 

The Adulterer’s Music

Fighting Peacocks by James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Café in downtown Calgary, Canada, my love plays in a duet with another musician, a pianist, they don't make any effort to invite, I sit alone, and watch their music, then they leave together, my love and the showcase artist both make jokes with their naked bodies, and on a stage a temptress exposes herself to me, I walk alone on the street with my love's backpack of music equipment, abandoned

Sun, May 15, 2011