When I found out in late 2016 that I had terminal cancer, my mind immediately turned to the task of re-editing some of my earlier prose works. For the most part that consisted of revising SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul, a non-fiction book I published in 2002 on the history of preliterate oral poetry and in particular a contemporary version of it called SOULSPEAK, which I had developed in the late 1990s with poet Scylla Liscombe.
The other prose work that came immediately to mind was a memoir of my encounter with the pidgin poems of Eldred Van-Ooy titled MIRRORS, which I had published in 2011. It is a very unusual book in that while it wrestles vigorously—and at some length—with the problem of what is real it never becomes muscle bound in doing so. Indeed, in looking back at it, I find the memoir to be a perfect example of Keats maxim: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Although the exact nature of its truth and beauty may be hard to pin down in a few sentences, the memoir has always felt incredibly beautiful and incredibly true to me. It always left me in a shadowy garden, wondering, looking up at the leaves.
I have also come to look at it as a perfect example of how powerful and absolutely mysterious the unconscious can be in helping us find our true paths.
Before I go any further, however, let me say something about how I create poems because it is key to understanding much of what I am about to tell you. First of all, I am a very unconscious poet, i.e., I never plan a poem in any way. I simply wait for the Muse to arrive and then create the poem (either orally or in writing) exactly as given to me by the Muse. I see myself as a midwife who delivers the baby exactly as the baby wants to be delivered. I never interfere before, during, or after the birth. I am somewhat alone in this in today’s poetry culture.
The other thing I want to tell you is that while many report having experiences of déjà vu, I seldom have them. Google defines déjà vu as “…a feeling of having already experienced the present situation.”
However, what I often do have is what I have come to call pour être vu (to be seen). Without warning, my eyes will suddenly lock onto something and I will simultaneously experience the same heightened attentiveness and brightening that I do when a poem comes to me. I have learned over time that it is also a signal that sometime in the future I will experience something similar to whatever my eyes had locked onto.
Let me give you an example. In 1979, when I first moved to Sarasota, I met a charming character by the name of Ed Clancy. Ed was a very natty dresser (shirt, tie, jacket and slacks no matter what the situation) and that aspect of his appearance along with his white, up-turned mustache and congenial nature always reminded me of the Esky character in the Esquire magazine. So it didn’t surprise me to find out that his friends always affectionately referred to him as The Duke of Five Points—especially when he was holding court at Marina Jack’s with a bourbon in his hand.
I was in my early forties at the time and Ed was in his mid-sixties, and I remember being out sailing one day when a huge cabin cruiser, its deck loaded with middle-aged bikinis and beer-drinking baseball caps, came roaring alongside. I remember looking up and right in the middle of the jeering crowd, laughing and toasting me from high up on the deck, was the Duke himself.
It always got a kick out of seeing the Duke, but this time he was wearing shorts and I could see a great deal of loose flesh hanging from his thighs. My eyes locked onto the loose flesh and I felt that heightened attentiveness and brightening that always signaled I was going to experience something similar in the future.
At the time, I remember thinking that he must have been much heavier at an earlier stage of his life and had experienced a severe weight loss, as he was quite slim when I met him, as was I, weighing about 190 pounds.
However, some twenty odd years later as I approached my late sixties, I was pushing 280 pounds and by my mid-seventies I began having some very serious health problems. I began to rapidly lose a huge amount of weight and the flesh all around my body began to hang a la the Duke’s thighs. Need I say more?
Let me give you an example of pour être vu more to point of this commentary. In 1985, as soon as I had displayed the floppy disk containing Van-Ooy’s pidgin poems, I knew they were something extraordinary. I also had the distinct feeling that the other shoe had finally dropped.
What I mean by that is that the first shoe had dropped a few years before I moved to Sarasota in 1979, when I had a pour être vu experience as I was browsing through a copy of National Geographic and came across an article on New Guinea containing some photographs of road signs written in pidgin. I remember my eyes locking onto the pidgin signs and feeling the heightened attentiveness and brightening signaling I was going to experience something similar in the future. That was the first shoe. The other shoe dropped when the floppy disk containing the first two Van-Ooy pidgin poems arrived in my mailbox in 1985.
What I didn’t know, however, was that I would also soon begin a long soul journey into the world of oral, preliterate poetry, the Mother Goddess period, and the nature of consciousness. It would be a soul-guided journey that would dramatically change my worldview, life and art.
To help you better understand where I am going with this let me refresh your memory as to what happened after I received the first two of Van-Ooy’s pidgin poems.
I spent a great deal of effort trying to find counterparts (written pidgin poems and stories) but unfortunately my efforts yielded absolutely nothing. I knew the absence of similar pidgin poems and stories was going to make checking the accuracy of my translations difficult, but it also made me realize how truly unique Van-Ooy’s pidgin poems were.
I then sent the two pidgin poems to a linguist specializing in pidgin to verify they were the real thing. After being assured they were, I contemplated publishing a small chapbook containing the two poems and my translations, but as the AFTERWORD makes clear, the origin and authorship of the pidgin poems was so questionable that I decided the only sensible course was to file them away and forget about them. It was a very painful decision because I loved those two poems (Drimtaim and Mi Tair).
However, as the AFTERWORD also makes clear, I wasn’t able to forget the poems, nor were they able to forget me. In 2005 on a visit to Alamos Mexico, Mi Tair and Drimtaim appeared to me in a dream as two magical, numinous children who told me they were tired of wandering, that they wanted roots in this world—a home, if you please. Then five years later, around 2010, while I was driving to the Green Fountain Garden Shop in Bradenton to buy some pink Mandeville vines, three additional poems—in a mixture of both English and Tok Pisin along with Eldred’s history—came to me in a sudden rush.
At this point, it became obvious to me that I was being guided in some way. It was also obvious to me that the time had come to do something with Van-Ooy’s work, so in 2011 I finally published the first two poems plus the three additional poems (Mi Go Ples Bilong Mi , Toktok Nem Bilong Samting and Nambartu Meri Bilong Mi ) and Eldred’s history exactly as the Muse had delivered them to me. Those five poems along with my translations and commentary in the form of a FOREWORD and AFTERWORD made up a book simply titled MIRRORS. It was published by Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press in 2011.
I thought that would be the end of it, but as I mentioned earlier, when I discovered in 2016 that I had terminal cancer I wanted to say something about how powerful and absolutely mysterious the unconscious can be in helping us find our true paths, because it was clear to me that the appearance of the first two Van-Ooy pidgin poems in 1985 was the most important (not to mention mysterious) of the many related visitations that helped guide me in this. That period of visitations lasted some 25 years—the last being in 2010 when the rest of Van-Ooy’s poems and history suddenly came to me.
Let me sidestep a bit here and tell you that somewhere in this period, around 2007, when Alice Hickey, an extraordinary psychic, said prophetically to me:
“You’re going to have to forget who you are so you can remember who you truly are—and that is going to take you to some very dark places. You’re going to have to die and be reborn—spiritually, not physically. And when that happens, you're going to walk out of the tomb and tell others about it.”
“You mean like Jesus? Alice, please.”
“Don’t worry. You’re no Jesus. And stop being so ingenuous; you know it’s the way these things happen.”
“Then what is all this about?”
“It’s about becoming a herald. You can’t be a true herald without being reborn.”
“You mean I’m going to go though all this so I can be a herald?”
“Nope. You’re going to do it so you can know your one true name. The heralding comes with that—it’s part of the territory.”
“And what exactly is it I’m going to be heralding?”
“I don't have the slightest idea. But I do know this: you're going to help others in a way that would be incomprehensible to you now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I can feel it.”
“You're not helping me at all, Alice.”
“Stop complaining and shut up for a minute, will you? Try to think about what I've been telling you.”
“I am thinking.”
“I don't mean that kind of thinking. Didn’t I tell you to stop thinking? Forget about trying to figure it all out. You can’t. And you never will.”
End excerpt from ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds
I want to say something about the above excerpt, but before I do, I should tell you that I continued to resist Alice’s prediction of my being a herald by continually reminding her that I was a private person, not someone who got up on soapboxes. I rode her pretty hard on that until one day she suddenly barked at me to stop being so self-centered, that I wouldn’t be the only one, that there would be many others announcing the same truth, and that each of them would have their own way of doing it, and that knowing me, I’d probably write about it in my own way and that would be enough.
Alice was always way ahead of me, something that will be more than evident if you read ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds. It covers a period from 2000-2007 in which I was assailed by a series of psychic events that I’m sure would have cost me my sanity if it hadn’t been for the aid and guidance of psychic Alice Hickey. If you want to know more about this period, a free PDF of the book can be downloaded by Googling: justin spring books guide to alice hickey
As I mentioned earlier, it was shortly after this 2000-2007 period, around 2010, that I decided the Van-Ooy poems needed to be published, and I did so in 2011 in a book titled MIRRORS.
At the time, I didn’t connect its publication to what Alice had said to me about becoming who I truly was, but when I began writing this commentary in 2016 for a revised version titled MIRRORS: the Aborigine Poetry of Eldred VanOoy, the connection between the Van-Ooy poems and Alice’s prediction of my eventually becoming who I truly was—a herald, an announcer of a truth—began to come into focus, not perfectly by any means, but enough make me pay attention.
I think that’s as good as it gets in matters of this kind. Alice’s last words to me were pretty much on the money in this regard: “Forget about trying to figure it all out. You can’t. And you never will.”
So there you have it. Time will tell if my vague sense of a connection between the Van-Ooy poems and Alice’s prediction of my becoming a herald bears itself out.
If finally arriving at who we truly are, or as Alice put it—knowing our one true name—can sometimes be like unfolding the mysterious petals of a strange, dense flower, not knowing when or where it will end, the initial guiding visitations can usually be ours by simply becoming aware of the intuitions that are continually bubbling up from the unconscious, which I would liken to a very gentle breeze on the back of the neck.
The trick, of course, is not dismissing those gentle breezes, but doing our best to interpret them. In most cases this can be done by turning off our thinking minds and feeling our way towards the truths contained in those breezes. I have come to call that act leaning with fate.
We can, of course, ignore those intuitions, just as we can choose to ignore the more spectacular visions and voices that can rise up on rare occasions to guide us. We usually do this by dismissing them as hallucinations, or aberrations of the brain, which is what science has taught us to do.
When those voices and visions, however, take the intense waking form of something like the powerful psychic appearances of the Virgin of Fatima, or Lourdes or Guadalupe, we are talking about visitations of an entirely different order.
In the past, we have usually recognized those type of visions as being Divine in nature, whereas today, with our scientific world view and its insistence that there is only the physical world, we tend to see them as Aliens from another world.
These powerful psychic events, however, are extremely rare, and for most of us, guidance from the unconscious usually takes the form of intuitions, or more rarely, extremely vivid dreams. What we do with those intuitions and dreams is up to us, because as Jung has taught us, the unconscious seems to leave it up to us as to whether we choose to use them to find our true path.
We also have to remember that Jung sees the unconscious, or soul, as being essentially amoral, something like the Old Testament God who tortures Job. So aligning ourselves with its intuitions and dreams doesn’t mean we will live a good life and die a good death. It simply means that by aligning ourselves we will find our true path and become who we truly are.
This is sometimes described as finding our true path. Joseph Campbell calls that path following your bliss. Castaneda calls it the path with heart. There is one caveat, however, and that is finding our true path is no guarantee of ultimate happiness—only that we will live the life we were meant to live.
You might say that this is the bargain we unknowingly accept upon birth: either we can live the life we were meant to live or we can turn away from it. But that is it. How it ends is out of our hands.
In my own case, even as a child, if those intuitions were strong enough, I never turned away from them. It was second nature for me to go with them. Later on in life, I became more sensitive to them and learned to lean with the slightest breeze.
We have been talking up to now in Jungian, scientific terms, but it is time to get to the matter of the soul, which Jung equates at its deepest level to the unconscious. The soul has had many definitions over the millennia. In all the definitions I am aware of, some of its characteristics have been seen as being consciously observable, while others as utterly unknowable.
Jung cuts the Gordian knot for us by equating the soul at its deepest level to our unconscious minds, i.e., by seeing both as completely unknowable. I think he is correct in this. I further believe that at its deepest level the soul is who we truly are, and that we can find our true path by aligning our conscious lives with what it is trying to tell us through the vivid dreams and intuitions it is continually sending us.
That is a tricky game, because the soul only speaks to us in metaphors, not logical facts, and metaphors always have several meanings. The only way to do it is to feel your way towards the truth of those vivid dreams and intuitions. The logical mind is essentially useless in this enterprise.
For an “unconscious” artist like me, the soul also speaks to me through the works of art I have produced over the years, namely my collections of written poetry, SOULSPEAK oral poetry CDs, Dreamstory internet videos, as well as my musical compositions, visual art, and prose works in the form of memoirs, fiction, non-fiction and essays.
These works of art were never planned. All of them were initiated by my unconscious erupting into consciousness and forming themselves in the way they wished. The one exception I would make to this is my one work of non-fiction, which did take some amount of planning, but it was minimal; I am pretty much guided in everything I do.
I never interfere in the creation of these works of art, seeing myself as a midwife charged with allowing each birth to take place in the manner it desires.
In that respect, I am somewhat different from most contemporary poets who have become increasingly conscious in the creation of their poems. Robert Lowell’s remark to Elizabeth Bishop that it seemed to him that contemporary poetry would become more and more like prose is a reflection of this tendency.
I see it as the death of true poetry because only the Muse, the soul, the unconscious can initiate and close a poem correctly. There is no other way to achieve zero at the bone. None.
Which brings us to this section: Some Further Comments by the Author in 2016. Let me first say that this revised 2016 edition is identical to the 2011 edition except for this section, some minor changes and grammatical corrections, and an extended title of MIRRORS: The Aborigine Poetry of Eldred Van-Ooy.
I decided to write Some Further Comments because I realized I hadn’t said anything in the 2011 publication about the dramatic changes that began taking place in my life and art after the first two Van-Ooy pidgin poems appeared in my mailbox in 1985.
All of those changes came about not because of any conscious planning or decisions on my part. Rather they were the result of my unconscious erupting in a series of powerful intuitions and events, one of the most significant being the 1985 appearance of the first two of Van-Ooy’s poems in my mailbox.
I realize that what I have just said—that the appearance of the first two of Van-Ooy’s pidgin poems in my mailbox in 1985 was the result of some mysterious action on the part of my unconscious goes completely against our current scientific world view. Yet I also believe what philosophers and spiritual thinkers over the millennia have held, namely that at some level, the soul, or unconscious, transcends time and space, i.e., everything exists at once—there is no time or space.
Most will view what I have just said about the arrival of the first two pidgin poems as absolutely crazy, namely that my soul, or unconscious, was somehow the cause of an old business acquaintance in Australia sending me two pidgin poems of questionable provenance in 1985. Yet I unequivocally stand by it.
Those first two poems and the three that followed some years later eventually changed my entire world view and especially my view of poetry. In particular, the Van-Ooy poems eventually allowed me to leave the world of written poetry and enter the world of oral poetry. Almost everything is different about these two forms of poetry except that in each form the unconscious always initiates the poem and then closes it to produce an ecstatic moment of awareness where all boundaries disappear.
The one small exception I would make to this is that the moment of ecstasy that occurs when an oral poem closes is less sharp, i.e., it is more full-bodied, more diffuse. I sometimes liken the difference to that between the male orgasm and the more diffuse female orgasm.
Sometimes I think I travelled to the future, and sometimes the past, with the truth of the matter most probably being that I travelled to both.
The important thing, however, is not what I did, but that I finally arrived where I was supposed to be—a place where feeling came first—to paraphrase the first line of E. E. Cummings famous poem: since feeling is first. It was a place where I was able to create a true contemporary version of preliterate oral poetry called SOULSPEAK as well as an allied video form called Dreamstories. I consider both forms pioneering and an indication of the path some part of poetry will take in the future.
This makes me a strange animal in today’s poetry culture because it seems the only poets who truly understand the value of my journey were those who took the journey with me. As for those who didn’t, they continue to view my SOULSPEAK oral poetry as something that isn’t poetry—despite the fact that my many collections of prizewinning written poetry indicate quite forcibly that I know what poetry is. What my fellow poets really mean by saying SOULSPEAK isn’t poetry is that it isn’t written poetry, which is the only form of poetry they seem capable of recognizing as being poetry. All I can say is that Homer would have high-fived me.
The creation of a SOULSPEAK poem takes place in one fell swoop or it doesn’t occur at all. It requires you turn off your conscious mind and surrender completely to the Muse from a state I call Zen no mind. Doing that, and then allowing the Muse to rise up within you, re-ignites all of that ancient “oral wiring” still within us and allows a speaking to create itself in a way that brings the self and soul together in an ecstatic moment in which all boundaries disappear. This, by the way, is also a good definition of what should occur when any true poem is created, be it written or oral.
In a speaking, there are none of the endless corrections and substitutions that today’s poetry culture sees as indicative of how great written poetry is made. In other words, a speaking either occurs or it doesn’t. I look at those speakings that fail to close in one fell swoop as the equivalent of a failed birth. I never go back.
Speaking a poem (compared to writing a poem) is all the difference between making love in one fluid motion and making love while you are constantly interrupting the process for this or that. You tell me which is better. There is also the immediate realization that making a SOULSPEAK poem is not only an artistic process but also a human process that momentarily brings self and soul together and makes us whole—which is to say it makes us divine. Once you realize that, your whole world changes. Mine did.
Despite what I have just said, I must confess that I was initially blind to what the arrival of the first two Van-Ooy pidgin poems represented. Looking back, however, it is clear that their arrival was a message from some part of my unconscious that I should begin composing poems orally. I say this because Van-Ooy’s written pidgin poems were a perfect, word for word representation of an orally composed poem—and to boot, in a language (Tok Pisin) that was oral by definition, i.e., there is no written version of Tok Pisin except for the written version linguists and anthropologists have concocted. In short, the two pidgin poems were the perfect bait to bring me to oral composition. I should have gone for that bait hook line and sinker, but I didn’t.
Much of my blindness was undoubtedly due to the fact that at that time I hadn’t even begun to think about composing orally. I may have been further blinded by the fact that I was so dazzled by those first two pidgin poems that I couldn’t see beyond them. Despite the fact they were written in pidgin, their simplicity, rhythms, and speech-like clarity and directness seemed to me totally original, as was Van-Ooy’s mercurial attitude. Quite plainly, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
If I was consciously blind to what was going on with the appearance of the first two of Van-Ooy’s pidgin poems, I believe that some part of my unconscious easily saw the forest through the trees. It knew exactly what each of Van-Ooy’s pidgin poems were—an absolutely perfect representation of an orally composed poem.
From that time on, even though I still had no conscious thoughts about creating poems orally, some mysterious part of my unconscious began doing whatever it could to ignite my conscious desire to orally compose poems. It did this by guiding me toward other speech-like poets like Van-Ooy who would hopefully make me begin to think about orally composing and spontaneously speaking out poems.
Let me thicken the mix a bit now by telling you that the appearance of Van-Ooy’s pidgin poetry was not the first time I had been guided toward a potential source of ignition. This happened few years earlier, sometime in the early eighties, when I stumbled upon the poetry of C.P. Cafavy. While Van-Ooy’s poems had immediately dazzled me, that wasn’t the case with Cavafy. On the surface of things, Cafavy, a homosexual poet who lived in Alexandria Egypt, shouldn’t have interested me at all. I can