Robert Kelly: An Alchemical Journal (4)

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In 1955 I & some school-fellows attempted a revival of Batman as an object of inquiry. It does not feel good to have been in the avant-garde of kitsch. Yet my fingers smell of her authenticity, She Who Is To Be Obeyed, She who is wet.

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These are the books: The works of Gerhard Dorn
                 Michael Maier
Jakob Böhme
Robert Fludd
Thomas Vaughan

Not one of them but wrote with a goose-quill. Over the hen-yard, the scream of the chicken-hawk. Over the stream (Hortonville 1939), the blue scream of a kingfisher. Men who like to read books & watch birds. Presidents of the United States. Men who blow fine glass flasks with wild birds inside. Cegeste (F*lc*n*ll*’s name in the special bars of Toulon) worked it out just fine: L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Which means, when it comes to the Vessel of the work: the ouzel chants a wake six dights. Six nays. And on the seventh, breasts. Or casts a storm spell on the Wash. The Wish. They come to life again. L’auzel. L’aura amara. We picked the right road & the wrong goal. For a long time the kingfisher sat on the branch.

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Peonies in the olive jar, white water. Wise men read the labels. Water salt & acid added. But they are peonies, her holy flower, how the rain stinks of them. I love her. Wise men need no labels.

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There is something about new morning, dew on the sun & the people out on the loose again, that moves the bowels.

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After all this crap, time to understand. Yes, that was it; the Daring. The Irrevocable. Death as game. You will notice I do not speak of Death. I do not like that game. If you go on playing it I will take my life & go home. The Gnostic says. When I was a child I heard several sermons each summer (though once in a life would have been enough) about the boy who wilfully missed Mass on Sunday to go to the beach, & came back in a box. That’s the way they always said it: in a box—& there was no doubt what that meant. It is only now, in my thirty-first year, that I begin to doubt the relevance of the priest’s report. Yet each sin measures me & limits my work. When I have sinned I write in a box.

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We made love by the waterfall. Later we saw a snake. It was eating, ugly. I had no compassion for its hunger. Forgive me.

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As a strong man, I love to receive the commands of beautiful women.

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The course of love-making follows the phases of the moon. An ignorant girl wrote: ‘My dog flowed me to school.’ Dont everybody laff at once.

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What did she mean coming into my office & seeing the big picture of the fish &, asking me if I were the Fisher King? Yet she was beautiful. I clapped a hand to my thigh & worshiped —for the length of that casual, meant-to-be-humorous gesture—the woman secretly inside it. O unborn twin sister of mine, o death in my body come to life. I was black & blue from the injections, etc.

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So many birds of morning. Elephant on the desk. To each unit of the biological world belongs its proper gesture. We call it lucus, ‘grove,’ a non lucendo, from the fact that it is not bright inside it. Dark birds. The traveller asked for an empty glass. One tusk is longer than the other. In a poem of Rene Char’s we read of deujc pointes semblables, sun shining on two like tips, of the horn of the bull, of the sword that kills him. I have kept him all these years at the door, waiting for one to become empty.

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Its earliest glyph was the Ka, the upraised hands  

When we leave our house, only the wisest of us throws up his hands.

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The most remarkable event of the week was a mock crucifixion wherein a young man was lashed to a yellow cross propped up before the people. After saying of pretending to say certain words, he pretended to die. If one pronoun had slipped out of place, I honestly declare I would have lost my mind.

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But I didnt say what it was, of which the Ka, the upraised hands, was symbol. Call it in the simple jargon of our time, my time, a process. Fresh & light-footed Dante called Guinicelli’s love poems.

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All things are finally brought into the Furnace of Love. We have that assurance. The temperature.

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Mosquito bite on my thigh, a gentle enough punishment for all the thighs I’ve bitten. I mean all the times I’ve bitten thighs.

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In a play of Joel Oppenheimer’s, the classical historical western desperadoes look down from cowboy heaven on the struggles of the characters of the play. At times they speak. When I saw the play performed, the desperadoes were enacted by poets. The fertility of a contrivance is out of all proportion to its meaning. Or a sentence.

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Hoping to learn by a sign how the Work prospers, I look out the window, first moving the curtain on which the terra cotta  ♀ Mirror of Ashtaroth reflects no image.

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I’ll try again to say it straight. Hoping to learn by a sign how the Work prospers, I move the curtain & look out, morning

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The language has roots in me, by it I am grown, leaf & hand & tongue. Who is this language? Who is this King of Glory? I have sharpened my pen. I have opened the gates of the Temple.

[…to be continued]