The Double Refuge ☯️ Herr Jung
Animal Dreams
III: Make Me Thy Lyre
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My Chinese lesbian sex maniac may be an anima or a complex. Yet I suspect that in fact she’s an empirical construction embedded in the bewildering layers of neurons in my mind. My hope is that she’s also a vehicle — like she is for Larissa Lai’s protagonist — that allows me to transcend borders and dualities, figures and definitions, so that I can merge with Infinity, God, the Dao, or whatever we want to call It.
Allow me to explain. Part of me is an Neoplatonic ascetic, having been baptized by Shelly in my youth. Another part of me is a sensualist, having later converted to The Church of Byron by its high priest, John Keats. Or, perhaps Keats is more John the Baptist than high priest. Byron might appreciate that, at least after thinking about it for 200 years, and after reading the odes and sonnets of the poet he called a tadpole of the lakes.
Imagine this:
Keats’ body lifts up from the bloody coughing claustrophobia of his room next to the Spanish Steps. His body floats over the Roman streets and out toward the ocean, his spirit ascending higher and higher until it reaches the final 55th stanza of Shelley’s memorial poem Adonais. With Shelley, we sail into the realm of the gods, with the spirit of Keats as the strong wind at our backs:
The breath whose might I have invok'd in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
Byron is at the same time wading into the waters of the Ligurian Sea, the benediction of Prophet John leaking into his brain and soaking into his garments as he immerses himself in the water. The water takes us all down with it, just as it took Shelley in July of 1822, as he sailed home to Lerici after visiting Byron in Pisa.
Shelley was sailing northward along the Ligurian coast toward La Spezia in his little schooner (which the aesthete Shelley called Ariel and the egotist Byron called Don Juan) when a sudden squall sank the poorly-built schooner. The body of Shelley washed up near Viareggio, unrecognizable except for his clothing and a book of Keats’ poetry in his pocket.
I’d bring the three poets together into a postmortem second generational Romantic Trinity, a syncretic thrice great Trismegistan alchemy, a Vedic sacrifice in which everything is the food of love and beauty — the high, the low, and everything in between. The ancient Vedic poets would add a mystical depth to the floating proceedings, especially if we were to bring in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” where he addresses a natural deity that seems very close to like Shiva or Vishnu: “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; / Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!”; “Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!”:
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
While Shelley wasn’t a Hindu (at least as far as he knew), his sensibility of communion with natural forces, as we see in his plea, “Be thou me, impetuous one!” — suggests a close albeit inisible connection. The 2nd millennium BC language of the Vedic poets is naturally stranger than that of Shelley, yet I see it as a sort of universal poetry, combining ancient obscurities with natural imagery that everyone can understand. I imagine that its mix sense and spirit would make Shelley want to join the ancient poets in their soma-drenched visions of flight:
These ascetics, swathed in wind, put dirty red rags on. When gods enter them, they ride with the rush of the wind.
I imagine a heady mix of heavenly flight and earthly sensuality: I see her sitting alone at a bar at the same moment she sees me. At the exact same moment we seduce and are seduced. Three pitchers of mead later we’re fucking our brains out in a strange studio, on a bed of dreams.
The stallion of the wind, friend of gales, lashed on by gods – the ascetic lives in the two seas, on the east and on the west.
He moves with the motion of heavenly girls and youths, of wild beasts. Long-hair, reading their minds, is their sweet, their most exciting friend.
In bed, embedded, no existential gulf divides my conscious self from her in all her conscious and unconscious forms. Trauma there may have been, yet complex there is none. At least not of a problematic kind. Tantra there remains, like religion and poetry wrapped up inside me, together dancing beneath the sugared sky:
They are like girls anointing themselves with perfumed oil to go to a wedding. Where Soma is pressed, where there is sacrifice, there the streams of butter are made clear.
She’s a fox, an apsara, a bargainer no doubt, but not a Mephistopheles — unless we’re hell-bent on conjuring evil in the Garden of Delight. Unless we see, like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, a devil behind every bush. Bacchus and Saint Francis would be appalled if we were to turn beauty into sin in this way. To chase this joy from the Garden would require a host of Blakean priests in black gowns, rotating day and night with fig leaves in their hands, doing their rounds.
I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, calling it honey.
(Rg Veda 10.136, 4.58, 8.48)
All in all, sex is a victimless sin that beggars its own noun. For if these smooth body parts, this honeyed skin and eyes so black, were in fact a sin, it were better we weren’t born.
Prudes find strange fashions behind each tree
And inside each root that fashions you and me
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Next: ☯️ Aura 4: Emanations