Two Texts by Clayton Eshleman: (2) Orphic Ontologies II

Orphic Ontologies II

The essence of human power:
access to the cosmos from the heavens down to
earth & into the Cro-Magnon underworld

Charles Olson on Wallace Stevens. to Creeley, May 5, 1952: “For the lie in Stevens, however much
the pleasure in the play of words, is his language, that, it is without rhythm because it is without passion
which is person (not personae, that further divide against mass).”

To Creeley, May 6, 1952: “We both had a sudden excitement, just now talking, when it turns out (it was
that fucking Stevens who had provoked it by some line about poetry to undo dirt) O that dirty Crispin of
his—dirtier than Prufrock): those who keep themselves away from life (again protecting a—the
—pudenda) that Con said
                             I don’t feel any dirt
                                           And Christ I loved her, for, there ain’t none, and those who have it, who have this thing of original sin hung around their cocks like a  dead albatross, are of another tribe, a tribe of sin not at all of the  tribe of men
And it struck us both just then what what makes communication with you so open is, that you have none of this shit in you: you are free of that.”

In the beginning was drawing, line on stone or bone,
consciousness united with its own perceptions: womb of the creative!
A totally metaphoric world, no difference between subject & object.
Dream holes: anywhere but nowhere in particular.

James Hillman: “The most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The ‘worst’ images are thus the best, for these are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul.”

Think of this page as a phare on night’s alabaster dives & cornucopian emptiness, cross-wired to the
ochre of farraginous dreams.

One’s place is an expanding lesion in ancestral fog. Ultimately I am, sitting here, a ghost figure crouched
before a cave wall 20,000 years ago.

Pregnant abyss of the enigma of male birthing. Non-existent gestation—egg fertile only with the maggot
of self.

Is our war on animals a planetary cannibalization brought about by self eating self to reach non-
existence in a masque put on by hydrogen mountains & sulfur assassins?

The salmagundi of “now” & “forever” is the crucible that contains the frailty of eternity.

James Hillman: “Images are the compelling source of morality and religion as well as the
conscientiousness of art.”  Show this to Gary Snyder [See the Winter 1996 Paris Review Snyder Interview].

The writhing of precision as it meets time.

Perception is the handmaiden of imagination.

Cornucopia of the sunshine forest with its anteater molecules,
a Reich bion lurking in each word
whose apogee is cratered with emptied hives.

Sun as a circumference concentrate.

It is not enough to represent, to re-
present, the present as leftovers.
Warmed up past is forever at our heels.

The analphabetic, orthochromatic, anti-nature of the mind when freed of cauliflower containment.

Alive to the dead end in every observational move.

At the corner of Bukowski & Ashbery a groin helmeted with bridal choirs.

Fingering the pluck of plumeless existence ripe with skinned heads.

A Mayan anaconda coils below Arcadia’s latent still.

A stratigraphic sequence reveals its ember-work, its furnace forum always underway. It rests in a floral
nest, a leaden, still hissing egg.

James Hillman: “We have to tie terrorism to its roots in our religious consciousness. A terrorist
is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says
soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must
adapt to, is the external world and that world is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of
wiping out the psyche.”

Charred girders call out to us. Screeens of a stirring.
Parasites in sponge-like textures. Afterlife of the gone.

Yet Poussin’s satyr-scape is no more.
The anointing of the dead Adonis. No more.
Pan’s shadow as leafy quilts. Psychic clouds boiling westward. No more.
Blind Orion searching for the risen sun. No more.

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