It's not
going to get any better. The wind's
been picking up all afternoon.
Across
the
bay,
everything is darkening,
getting lower.
It's gathering
now. I can feel the air
cooling down all around me, like ice.
I don’t want to think about the skiff
being driven back and forth all night,
shuddering against her tether.
Listen to me.
I'm not talking to you about him: the one
who thinks he has to leave his wife.
I'm talking to you about the other one. The one who's dying, the one on fire, the one
that you've been hostaging.
Joan had spoken to me about that hostaging, and so had Jane: that somewhere within me I was keeping myself prisoner, but in a very special way, a way in which I was both prisoner and prison-keeper, both hostage and hostager . But the critical term is really hostaging, because it indicates some part of me is always actively and continuously bargaining with another part of me for my own release.
I have never been exactly sure how that scenario plays itself out or who the
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players are, but I have no doubt the bargaining is always going on. In fact, it is so much a part of me as to be evident in the rhythm and tone and progression of almost every poem I have ever made—the way they always open slowly and then suddenly close—like a door.
What was happening was so deep, so much a part of me, as to be out of my conscious control. I knew it was taking place though, which is why I never disagreed with Jane and Joan on the matter. There was no doubt in my mind that it was stopping me from being more open, more complete—emotionally, spiritually, creatively. But I could never see it; it was too dark. All I could ever see were the traces, the scars it kept leaving on my life.
Every scar, every injury or physical failure I’ve ever experienced has occurred on the left side of my body. The number of occurrences is not small. I could list them all on a long piece of paper, starting with my left ankle and ending up at my left eye, but it’s unimportant. What is important, though, is this grouping: left side of the body, creativity, intuition, moon, female. I don’t think anyone would argue with the correctness of that grouping—it is the grouping of the soul. Opposed to it is the grouping of the self: right side of the body, knowledge, reason, sun, male.
I think a psychic healer would take one look at me and come to the immediate conclusion that the healthy right side of me was living at the expense of my injured, deformed left side. She might even say that the right side of me was injuring my left by making it take the blows, and I wouldn’t argue. That is why I had no doubts that ISLAUGGH’s beaten, deathlike state and my own injured emotional state were very much connected.
Yet I also sensed that ISLAUGGH’s heralding of the myth might also have been meant for others. I never dismissed the possibility that the myth might lead others to a larger understanding of who they really were. Whether they would wind up deciphering the myth in the same way, I had no idea. I did know, however, that if they were to avoid the kind of problems I had trying to untangle it, they would need a few advance words.
The main problem was that the myth had been created from a mindset much different than ours: a preliterate mindset intimately acquainted with the four main players in the myth. Unlike us, they didn’t need an explanation of who the players were, or how they were related, or what the essential drama was.
As I pointed out earlier, the value of a preliterate story was never based on its ideas or originality, but on the way the story was told . Homer is the best example of this: the story of the Trojan War was known to all preliterate Greeks, and undoubtedly there were many competing epic versions in the time of Homer.
What distinguished Homer was the way he told the story, and the same is true of the Witnesses relating this myth. Preliterate humans listening to the myth would 220 ALICE HICKEY
have judged it on its muthos: the felt truth it conveyed about the human condition.
This helps explain why early storytelling poems are always straightforward, metaphoric, non-reflective. In other words, there is no introspection and little explanation, only declaration. In this kind of story, there is only, This happened, never an introspective Why this happened.
Perhaps another way of looking at the structure of the myth is to say the speakers of the myth aren’t at all concerned with ideas. There are very few handles for our modern explaining consciousness to grab onto. This myth is coming from a time when there were no ideas, or theories, only directives from the Gods. It was a time when knowing was accomplished by imitating the feeling of the thing to be known, not by examining it logically.
There is a world of difference between the two. Imitating something, whether it is done through movement or story or rhythm, requires that we have empathy for the thing we are going to imitate. I don’t think I have to explain how deep that level of empathy can go in some individuals. Keats once wrote that he could have empathy for a billiard ball. That is one indication of the depth of his poetic sensibility. Because the poetic state and the preliterate state of mind are so close, it also sheds a powerful light on how deep the empathetic powers of preliterate humans must have been. It was that ability to deeply empathize that fueled the imitative knowing of early man.
I’m not talking here about the knowing involved, say, in building a boat—that would have been handed down much as it is today: you do this and then you do this. I’m talking about the knowing involved in understanding what death means, and birth, and love, and fate. The preliterate Greeks called that kind of knowing muthos. Muthos meant that knowing was conveyed by story poems, by narrative imitations of felt truths . Some of those stories eventually became the great narrative poems we know today as myths.
The Witnesses Log myth is no different. It conveys its truth, its knowing, through a story, through muthos. It conveys its many truths not by explaining them, but by imitating them, which in the end can only be done through poetry. One of those truths is the nature of preliterate consciousness—of Female Spirit-driven consciousness. You can think of the myth as a story poem about the four elements driving early preliterate human consciousness. It’s an imitation of what that first consciousness felt like.
That kind of knowing is a very difficult thing for our explaining consciousness to get its arms around. I remember a bright, young math professor of mine at Columbia many years ago talking about early Babylonian mathematics. It seems they didn’t so much prove by logical deduction that the interior angles of an isosceles triangle were always equal, as the Greeks did, but by physically drawing
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many different isosceles triangles until everyone agreed about the interior angles.
This amused my professor to no end, but something about it stuck in my mind.
My preliterate soul must have recognized it. My professor had most likely been talking about a very early mathematics that hadn’t yet begun to follow the path of the super-logical, reasoning Greeks. This was undoubtedly about the time the Babylonians discovered writing, but some part of them must have still preferred their preliterate way of knowing. In this curious case it meant imitating the thing in question until everyone felt it was true.
If we really want to understand the elaborately staged sacrifices and sacred copulations of late, preliterate Babylon, or Aztec Mexico for that matter, we have to understand that they were created as spiritual imitations of the interlinked mystery of creation and destruction at the heart of all existence. They were praise acts, celebrations.
These ceremonies, of course, took place at a very late stage of preliterate culture, where spectacle was beginning to replace the simplicity of participatory tribal poetry. Yet the intention was the same: to know, to feel, to understand life’s mysteries by imitating them. And that imitation, even at this late stage of spectacle, always took the form of poetry in its primal, communal form: mask, movement, music, spontaneous antiphonal speaking.
I should perhaps add something more here about what I mean by imitation, just to make sure I’m being clear . If I were a preliterate human I would go about understanding what a duck is, and how it fit into creation, by imitating a duck. By imitating, I don’t mean merely doing a surface mimicking of its movements and sounds, which is really only a preliminary step, but by entering its “duck-ness”—
the duck’s soul, its essence. This would be especially true if the duck was to be my totem, or spirit guide.
I remember years ago hearing a very good actor say that for him to truly enter a character, the way that character thought, talked, and moved, he had to first imitate the character’s breathing, get it down cold, which, I might add, is itself a very intuitive act, as the full character would be relatively unformed at that time.
That insight allowed me to overcome a problem I was having in my early attempts to speak directly and fluently from the unconscious. At times I would take off only to sputter and lose it, but I didn’t understand it was because sometimes my breathing wasn’t right for the poetic persona that was attempting to speak though me, including the persona I knew as me. The actor’s comments rang a bell and I understood I had to surrender to the breathing patterns of whatever persona within me was attempting to speak. It is such a purely intuitive act that I’m amazed to think I eventually achieved it, especially since that surrendering has to occur just prior to my physically speaking, a gap of seconds.
222 ALICE HICKEY
The kind of imitation that the actor described, it seems to me, is very close to what preliterate man did reflexively, without thinking. It is an example of the closeness of the creative mind to that earlier consciousness. What preliterate man did in order to imitate the duck—something that was required, for example, if the duck was to be his totem, or spiritual ally, or guide—was to enter the duck’s soul through lucid dreaming, or a similar altered state, and transcendently witness the duck’s soul: it’s essence. That is, he would observe it and then at some later stage, when he became fully conscious, report to others what he had seen.
The reporting in this case wouldn’t be so much verbal as physical. After all, stories can take many forms besides speech. He would move like a duck, make sounds like a duck, react like a duck. His transcendent witnessing would allow him to bring his imitation of the duck to full life. The duck’s essence would now be within him as an ally, to guide and aid him. But his peers would be informed by his reporting as well. They would understand who he truly was, that he had duck-ness.
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Chapter 46: I Visit Graves
September 2006, Sarasota
Alice mentioned Robert Graves’ The White Goddess to me one day, and her description of the book whetted my interest. I had been aware of Graves as a poet most of my adult life, and had always liked the fact he chose to exist outside the academic establishment (an economic choice few poets make today—preferring a steady position to having to scramble in the streets for pennies). Added to that was the fact that he also made a life for himself in Majorca, not cold, grimy England. Moving to Majorca when he did undoubtedly took a good bit of nerve, something that Graves didn’t seem to lack, and I liked him for that as well.
What I didn’t like about Graves, however, was his poetry. I was prepared to like it when I first picked it up many years ago, but found I couldn’t. His work was much too formal, too conscious for my taste. Poetry is a wild horse, one that doesn’t want be fenced in by overly-conscious schemes. As soon as that happens it begins to die. I think some of that happened with Graves’ poetry.
Fortunately, Graves was a bit of a wild horse himself. After all, anyone who did what Graves did—unearth the Mother Goddess culture of preliterate man with his highly controversial The White Goddess— marked him as a man who was clearly willing to go against the grain. So despite my problems with his poetry, it was very clear to me after reading The White Goddess that Graves had very strong beliefs about poetry that were surprisingly close to my own—and that he was willing to back them up with whatever it took.
I liked him for that. I had chosen a similar route in some respects. During the first twenty years of my adult life I not only wrote poetry but also worked in the computer business until it became clear to me I was dying. Not physically but spiritually. I saw I could no longer do computers with my right hand and poetry with my left. It was splitting me right down the middle. I sold my half of a highly profitable company to my partner and came out of it with enough to return full time to poetry with only an occasional need to scramble for pennies in the streets.
And I was able to do it in my own way while living in Sarasota, which became my Majorca of sorts.
And now here I was, face to face with Graves’ The White Goddess, which was his name for the Mother Goddess. Before I read the book, I went on the web to read whatever reviews and critical essays I could find. There were surprisingly few, and even fewer that made sense. When I began to read the book, I found out why.
Graves has to be one of the most undisciplined thinkers ever. It’s a wonder the book was even published. Graves’ reputation and incredible depth on mythic matters must have been the deciding factor, but the book is so unintelligible I can 224 ALICE HICKEY
just as easily see his puzzled publishers tossing a coin as to whether to junk it or print it.
As far as the reader is concerned, Graves’ disorganized style dashes any hope that A will lead logically to B and then C. But what makes the book utterly exasperating is the sheer depth of Graves’ knowledge about preliterate myths and culture. Unless you are steeped in the scholarship, you simply have no idea if Graves is correct in his assumptions and conclusions. I felt like a six year old who had wandered into a quantum mechanics class. I also suspect that there were few people anywhere who could match Graves’ breadth of knowledge, which probably explains the lack of criticism of The White Goddess. Graves simply knew too much.
I was about to give up on Graves when I happened across a recording of him on the web talking about The White Goddess. I immediately liked the soft lilt of his voice and the genuine way he spoke about his beliefs. If there is one thing I have learned through the art of speaking it is that truth has a physical, audible sound, a sound like no other, and Graves had it. I signed on and went back to the book and began puzzling my way through it.
As Graves saw it, there are two types of poetry, which I will loosely classify as Poems of the Moon and Poems of the Sun. The Poems of the Moon are more instinctive, the kind that raise the hair on the back of your neck. The other poems, the Poems of the Sun, are more intellectual, more of the conscious mind. Graves saw Poems of the Moon as having ancient roots back to the preliterate celebrations of the Mother Goddess .
He spends chapter after chapter piecing together scraps of myth from all over England, Ireland, Wales, and Europe in order to prove it. Unfortunately, I usually found his proofs bewildering and could almost never follow them. That didn’t necessarily bother me because he seemed so sure of himself. I might not have been able to follow him, but Graves never seemed to have any doubts about what he was doing or where he was going. He was a man on the hunt.
I couldn’t help but admire Graves for overcoming the obstacles he must have encountered in interpreting the mythical scraps that made up his raw material.
What I really admired, though, was that he made no bones about accepting the frequent psychic insights that often supplied him with missing parts of a myth he was trying to untangle. He had a different name for those visitations —analeptic thinking is what he called them—but he had no doubt as to their accuracy. And from the lack of criticism of his arguments and conclusions, it is evident his analeptic thinking was indeed highly accurate.
The other thing that became apparent to me was that Graves’ mythic information almost always came from that borderline period between the collapse of a
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preliterate culture and its subsequent evolution into a literate one. It didn’t seem to bother Graves that all his data pointing back to the preliterate White Goddess came from this much later time when those early tribal cultures had become highly organized and were at the edge of becoming literate. This is obvious from his descriptions of a poet’s many-faceted, court-related duties, as well as from the thirteen themes he cites as being a part of the Mother Goddess celebrations. I find it impossible to believe that poetic celebrations as elaborate as Graves outlines could ever be a part of early tribal cultures.
Yet despite those difficulties and the fact he seemed completely ignorant of Jung’s contemporaneous work with unconscious archetypes, and most especially the Mother archetype, Graves was able to present us with a view of the Mother Goddess myth that is, as far as I can tell, essentially correct.
What saved Graves was the incredible strength of the Mother Goddess myth. The river of the Mother Goddess was wide enough and deep enough and strong enough to overcome everything thrown in its path, including the unavoidable manhandling of the literate mind. Thus, what Graves was able to give us, despite all the problems involved, is not only a good picture of the Mother Goddess , but some very interesting conclusions about the nature of poetry as well.
The first is that any poet who unconsciously or intuitively imitates any of the thirteen poetic themes of the White Goddess will produce a “true” poem—a poem that makes us feel, in the words of Emily Dickinson, “zero at the bone.”
Graves had his own way of saying it:
“The reason why the hairs stand on end, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust--the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”
That is Graves’ explanation of why true poems produce a feeling of “mixed exaltation and horror. ” I do have a slight problem with Graves, however, on the nature of the emotional experience caused by his Poems of the Moon . I see that experience not as one of horror, but as fear of the unknowable becoming known.
And while Graves’ sense of exaltation is close to my own feeling of ecstatic beauty and truth, it is not as close as I’d like to see it.
Still, if Graves stretched his description of the poetic experience to fit his thesis, it is not worth worrying about. When you get around to the true grit of a poem, it’s close enough. Nor would I dismiss his suggestion that the Muse is another name, perhaps a slightly later name, for the Mother Goddess. Although this startled me 226 ALICE HICKEY
at first, something kept telling me he was right—that perhaps it seemed fantastical only because modern thought has completely disassociated the idea of Poetry from the idea of the Mother.
As I tossed Graves’ Mother Goddess/Muse around in my mind, I found myself wandering back to my own grandmother, who had come over from Ireland as a young woman in the late 19th century. Storytelling was second nature to her—the oral tradition was still alive in Ireland—and she was the match of anyone. My mother tells of my grandmother gathering up her seven children and the children of neighbors for long evenings of spine-chilling stories—evenings so spellbinding and terrifying, according to my mother, that some of the children would refuse to walk home alone.
I had one experience of that when I was around six. At the time, my grandmother was in her sixties. What I remember is not the story so much, which was a very scary thriller involving the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and some lost children, but the way she gathered us in and settled into telling it. Dame Judith Anderson could have taken lessons. There was something primordial about it.
One thing that might indicate the intensity of the Mother Goddess within early, preliterate cultures as compared to, say, the Mother Gods within our own culture (like the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God), would be the fact that the Mother we’re talking about is both a Mother from Heaven, and a Mother from Hell and everything in between. Besides being the Mother who is the Source of all Life, this is also the Mother with a Thousand Arms and a Thousand Weapons.
The Greeks have supplied us with a highly detailed, albeit indirect picture of how much the Mother Goddess was feared in their many references to women being the irrational, passion-driven enemies of reason, which the newly literate, super-logical Greeks saw as the very essence of the soul. It seems that for all their advances, the Greeks lived in a very real fear that their new literate, logical consciousness might collapse under the potential fury of the Mother Goddess.
One illustration of this lies in the various tales of Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, and how her serpent-driven Dionysian practices drove both Alexander and Philip—two men who weren’t afraid of anything—straight up the wall. Olympias, a Greek princess from the Northern barbaric kingdom of Epirus who traced her semi-divine lineage back to Hercules, and who is sometimes pictured as being red-haired and of Celtic heritage, is an historic figure who is a pretty fair embodiment of the Mother Goddess. She was proud, beautiful, sexy, ruthless, mothering, controlling, murderous, loving, envious, life-giving, you name it. You didn’t mess with Olympias.
Here is Graves’ own description of the Mother Goddess:
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. . . As Goddess of the Underworld she was concerned with Birth, Procreation, and Death. As Goddess of the Earth she was concerned with the three seasons of Spring, Summer, and Winter: She animated trees and plants and ruled all living creatures. As Goddess of the Sky she was the Moon, in her three phases of New Moon, Full Moon, and Waning Moon . . . But it must never be forgotten that the Triple Goddess . . . was a personification of primitive woman--woman the creatress and destructress. As the New Moon or Spring she was girl; as the Full Moon or Summer she was woman; as the Old Moon or Winter she was hag.
I’m sure Graves would agree it didn’t stop there. All of the attributes of the Mother Goddess were a constant subject of praise, including her sexuality. Some research I did into Celtic preliterate traditions turned up a Roman account of a Celtic chief fornicating in public once a year with a white mare, undoubtedly a living representation of the White Goddess.
Not exactly saying the rosary, is it? What’s more, unless the mare was very small, like a small Shetland pony, the chief must have had to stand on a box, or an altar of some kind in order to consummate the act. The disproportionate size of the participants is, again, a good indicator as to how dominant the Mother Goddess was.
If you still have some doubts as to how deeply engrained Mother Goddess worship was in preliterate cultures, I suggest you mull over the scene between the chief and the mare for a while. While you’re doing that, here’s something else to ponder: while he was fornicating with the mare, what was the chief thinking—or even more a propos our early consciousness—would the chief have been thinking at all?
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Chapter 47: Alice Leaps to Her Death
January 2007, Sarasota
I had a second vivid dream about Alice. The setting was the same—the George Washington Bridge. This didn’t surprise me. I have many repetitive dreams—
dreams that utilize the same metaphor to represent some critical aspect of my internal life. I automatically consider them important soul messages. Some have gone on for as long as ten, twenty, even thirty years.
For instance, I continue to have a repetitive dream about my catamaran, a boat I sailed most of my adult life. In the dream, it is continually being damaged?