Bethesda Fountain
Proem: Anima Mundi
On Earth we never got higher
than Machu Pichu, lower than
that cataract of the Blue Nile,
unless you count your recesses
Grand Canyons of God as I did,
your hostile eyes Everest heights.
Now that there is nowhere to go,
we stare apart at the same sea.
When we traded one another
for partners in slow caravans,
we knew it was for good, that we
could go no further in bodies
that had drained themselves of secrets
inscripted in red and white,
parchments a god had torn in half.
I hear you still recalling me
as you stare at that cold ocean,
not Indian or Pacific.
Know that I have already passed
into the angel I mistook
you for and am alive in her
about to start the last voyage
we once began but could not end,
mistaking one for another.
The First lesson
1.
First the stellar cloud
in butterfly folds
of blue, gold, magenta–
a double torus rotation
of a perfect hypersphere.
2.
I understood this to be
the colorful plasma
from which you stirred,
alert to the clay wet
fingers of dark matter
that shaped you
from the radiant death
of exhausted stars.
3.
Then a Saturn ring
around a fast
rotating neutron star
that in its orbit
hummed two notes
of decreasing pitch
as the longer
elliptical wing
swung round—
a ballet dancer’s
Fouetté en tournant,
or an angel
with extended wings.
Was this your history–
the Pleiades’ lost star–
or our common ancestry
and former clouds of glory?
4.
Carboniferous ferns
compressed to coal,
I burn and run
on millions of years
of animal sex
compressed
to pistoned heat
in an iron age.
What am I
paired to you?
The Second Lesson
1.
At seventy,
it is not morbid
to think of death,
anymore than it is
to dream of birth
inside the womb.
2.
The body registers
the aftershock
when you’re alone
in someone else
you cannot see
but can conjure
and configure
with other organs
of perception–
not sight exactly,
vision certainly.
The spine becomes
the axis of a torus,
body’s other architecture,
its three dimensions.
doubled by spiraled wings.
3.
In lucid dreams
it’s all upside down again–
the sky a sea above
as you swim up
into a second sky
where sight is not
so object bound
but a fluid medium.
4.
The body is embedded
in realms of desire
that got us here,
voyeurs of lovers
who parented us.
The bed takes the stamp
of curving forms,
valleys we stream into,
caught by sexual dreams.
5.
At first the angel
takes the form
of loved wives,
then madder loves;
you replay the moves
and parts of love,
but the body
starts to break up—
pixels of thought–
thighs become clouds,
the vulva apart
in golden light
of sky not bed.
6.
If you do not
follow her up
into abundance
but linger attached
to the parts, she returns
in a swirl of cloud
that becomes her face,
smiling and saying:
“I keep losing you.”
If you follow her,
she lifts you up
from going down
on her in folds
that shift to clouds,
then a stellar cloud
of gold, red, magenta,
and intense sapphire blue.
7.
How did they know
to call Marlene Dietrich
Der Blaue Engel,
whose wide full
Brünhildic thighs
invite being born?
8.
Conscious birth,
conscious death,
if you hold on,
attached to the old body,
the delta becomes mud,
the piss and shit
and rotting brain
of old age caught
in hospitals
and nursing homes,
bound in tubes
and drugged in order
to keep angels out.
9.
Why do I always go back
to where I have been,
seeking to repeat
the vision of last night?
Each night is new.
If I seek to go
to hypnagogic states,
she’ll hold me
to the waking mind,
showing it’s closer
to spirit than soul,
as air is to light,
and water is to mud.
10.
Awake, “now” becomes,
not successive thoughts
backed up by the beat,
but the spaces between
heartbeat and thought—
the background mind
on which thoughts float,
surface waves on a sea.
11.
Held in Indra’s jeweled net
of sapphire stars,
I see in the opening
of the third eye,
she ‘s keeping me
from the astral world
of indulgent desire,
revealing I am
actually in her,
as I was once
inside the womb.
12.
What others will see
as the body’s death
will actually be
me coming not going.
13.
To be born you leave
the womb in a birth
that is like being blown
along the entire shaft
of your finally extended body.
14.
Inside this angel’s body
of 3-sphered light,
I learn that I too
have her stellar form,
and that my life has
more than its years.
15.
In reversing time,
you become your parents
before you were conceived,
then realize they’re symbols
and you end
in your Daimon
with your Angel
becoming one again.
The Third Lesson
1.
In hypnagogic trance
of lucid dream,
you conjure a woman
built out of pure
desire—the one
you never had;
but now you’ve got her–
her thighs around you,
breasts against your chest,
her wet lower lips
anointed in pure lust.
You look into her eyes
and realize
she’s an automaton,
little better than a coin
operated blow job
or a blown-up plastic doll.
2.
So how long
do you wish
to linger here?
Your angel watches,
above the hypnagogic
tranced erection.
She has more time
than you have,
better learn
how to spin
the flax of sex
into the linen
of your own
light shroud.
The Fourth Lesson
1.
The trick is to recall
the other life refracted
in image garbled dreams,
to see virtual worlds
equally playing us.
In lucid dreams we make
the plot up as we go,
then wake to find that life’s
another laptop game
in which we’ve cast ourselves.
2.
Earth’s our avatar,
a resource colony,
with old empires
serving as metaphors
of star systems
with stark archetypes
of opposing minds–
Orion’s Egyptian
hierarchies versus
light Pleiadean love.
Science fiction acted out
what we could not recall.
3.
I am the director
and the lead as well
and must be the two
at once, recovering
the mind I had before
I was born for the part.
4.
If I walk off the set,
thinking the director
all important, I fail
to see the star needs me
to be in human time–
the two supporting roles
of wise man and good friend
require that I have
the mind of director
and lead at once: two birds
on the selfsame tree, one
watches, the other tastes
the red ripening fruit.
5.
After the Earth is cleared
and Adam becomes clay
again at the bottom
of a reabundant sea,
these chimeric starlings
will be the new creatures
of Heaven on Earth
in New Jerusalem’s
green and pleasant land.
The Fifth Lesson
1.
I can see them now,
in my mind’s eye
can envision
the point ahead.
Marked by the spear
of Celtic Lugh
at the solstice path,
they are moving
to the still point
where we converge.
I have become
my own Stonehenge
winter sacrifice.
2.
I face the South,
Daimon to West,
Angel to East,
and await
the Pleiades.
My time-bound I
will vanish once
all consummate
their light bodies
of storied earth
and neutron star
over the crossing stone.
3.
On Iona,
I through Brigid’s
forehead star
saw the sacred
gold trifoil knot.
Now three become
one in the point.
I find myself
increasingly
needing to be
in conscious dying
Daimon and Angel
and not me.
The Sixth Lesson
1.
Often I would see them
in vatic dreams—
daughter and mother,
and would know
who they were—
Tara and Quan Yin,
Persephone and Demeter,
the entwined Goddess
of Maid and Mother–
of Ain Ghazal
and Ҫatal Hüyük
2.
In Gobekli Tepe,
in Ҫatal Hüyük,
Malta, Newgrange,
Stonehenge
and the hill of Tara,
the year’s king
must die.
The Great Mother
alone endures.
She is not fat,
or some fertility fetish;
she is vast,
containing everything.
An icon of time,
her lunar womb
is the wound that heals.
It is the phallus
that rises and falls,
vanishing with its
poignant time.
3.
For most of my life,
I have pursued
the daughter
as Tara or Shakti,
intent on Tantric
erotic transfiguration
to bodily escape
Holy Mother Church,
or just my Catholic Mom.
4.
In Tiahuanaco,
the Island of the Sun,
and the night shore
of that vast Andean lake
under unknown
constellations,
I lived all that out–
shuddering in her
in the tantric union
of the red and the white.
5.
Now it is again
the Mother’s time,
in death as it was
once in birth.
The yoga shifts
from sight to sound,
from the third eye
to the crown:
the infant’s fontanelle
comes out first,
the yogi’s crown,
re-enters first–
the prow in the cleft
of parting waves.
6.
So it is time
I face again
the primal cleft
of worlds
in a new yoga
where the red
and the white
are in the spine–
as taught
in that ancient
Tibetan art
of dying alive.
Pulsar
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William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson, Columnist, Thinking Otherwise
William Irwin Thompson (born July, 1938) is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He has made significant contributions to cultural history, social criticism, the philosophy of science, and the study of myth. He describes his writing and speaking style as “mind-jazz on ancient texts”. He is an astute reader of science, social science, history, and literature. He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association.
His book, Still Travels: Three Long Poems was published in 2009 by Wild River Books. To order a copy, click here: STILL TRAVELS.
WEBSITE: http://www.williamirwinthompson.org/
WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON IN THIS EDITION:
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE: Avatar – When Technology Displaces Culture
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE: Part 2 – The Shift from an Industrial to Planetary Civilization
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – From Religion to Post-Religious Spirituality: Conclusion
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – Nature and Invisible Environments
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – Of Culture and the Nature of Extinction
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – On Religion – Part One
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – On Religion and Nationalism: Ireland, Israel, and Palestine
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – Television and Social Class
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE – The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE: From Religion to Post-Religious Spirituality, Part Three
COLUMN – THINKING OTHERWISE: On Nuclear Power
COLUMN: LINDISFARNE CAFE – MEMOIR – Farewell Address at the Lindisfarne Fellows Conference
CULTURE – MEMOIR – Pilgrimage to Lindisfarne: 1972
CULTURE – MEMOIR – Sex and the Commune
CULTURE – MEMOIR – The Founding of the Lindisfarne Association in New York, 1971-73 – Part I
LINDISARNE CAFE – MEMOIR – Conclusion: The Economic Relevance of Lindisfarne
LINDISFARNE CAFE – MEMOIR: Raising Evan and Hilary: Reflections of a Homeschooling Parent
POETRY – A Lazy Sunday Afternoon
POETRY – After Heart Surgery: Hokusai’s Great Wave
POETRY – On Reading “The Penguin Book of English Verse”: on my iPad and Exercise Bike
THINKING OTHERWISE – Saint Patrick’s Day, 2010: US AND THEM: Identity and the State
WILD RIVER BOOKS/POETRY – NIGHTWATCH and DAYSHIFT: CÉZANNE
» View all articles by William Irwin Thompson
Comments
Robin (not verified) Posted 01:11 AM on Mar 8, 2016
Really beautiful poem, Bill. Thanks for sending it (if you did.) robin
Kelly (not verified) Posted 01:11 AM on Mar 8, 2016
Each night I dream of old loves — I, the beloved. Each morning the beloved fades into the little old lady I’ve become — the loss so profound that future artistic probes beyond the gateway to the galaxy seem out of my reach.
THIS MORNING: I read “Vade-Mecum Angelon” in “Wild River Review”. Then read again — aloud. What a blessing — the exquisite language — not language at all — but
“Spirit-Speak”
Today because of your angels — old angels awaken me — I face the mirror and enter in — not blocked by an old reflection in a glass and face myself where angels(do not) fear to tread.
“Vade-Mecum Angelon” stirs the dervishes to an inspired fever pitch —
and we dance.
We are blessed that you are here to take us beyond the mirror-images of the sacred-selves and the sacred cows we worship..
How rare. We thank you.
Robert Stahl (not verified) Posted 01:11 AM on Mar 8, 2016
Thank you! Inspired, timely, thoughtful, and alive, not to mention historically unique… One can, hardly, be more fortunate in comparison to others, than to have this point of calibration in humanity you so earnestly challenge for the better, if not fortunate for all the history you leave behind, and for providing such insight as this, plus your general contribution to being part of the resolution of its overall difficulty, a revolution. It is an ultimate Valentine.
Again, thank you.
Anonymous (not verified) Posted 01:11 AM on Mar 8, 2016
Amazing, genius, and inspiring—as is usual with your art; thank you for this.