Letter to Orphée

Thinking of a lyre of wood and wire and earth,
an earth lyre, I think of an elemental music,
a music made of earth, metals and woods
and stones of earth, played by wind howling
outside the house this dim, blustery day. The clouds
last evening, and pale light this morning, look like snow coming,
not rain. Rushes of sound, wind blowing across
the housetop, reverberate down the chimney.
Orpheus picks up a strangely curved branch of fallen
wood off the forest floor, strings it with copper wires, and plays.
His lyre summons spirits of the air, voices hiding behind
wind and mist, his singing voice, his poetry, becomes the telling
of seasons, days turning the planet under stars.
An elemental voice describing a concerto of ever-changing forces
and spirals in the sky. Spiral wood beams struck by lightning
embrace a pale white stone from anywhere but here.
Perhaps an ancient sea. You cannot be unaware, Orpheus,
that time and change take us all, that these stones eroding
to dust and leaves in this interstellar wind were once
a shallow sea, or that the peak of our tallest mountain
is made of shells of sea creatures that died millions of years gone
to fall to deep ooze and be pressed into rock
by the pressures of what came after. My home
is a temple of standing stones. Red and gold sandstones
form a shelter around whose curves the wind howls. We work
these metal flakes, gold bright and soft copper green, into veins
of the lyre of Orpheus, seams in the wood, ore seams in the earth.
Its copper strings gleam with forged memory. Its curve
is a memory of birds nesting in the crook of an ancient bole,
a tree much older than any bird, once fallen forgotten
by the descendants of sparrows and robins who once it sheltered.
Birds nest in the hair, the ear, of Orpheus, and dictate their songs
to his receptive tongue, his voice which forgets nothing,
not even the oldest groan of the planet giving spontaneous birth to life.
It's tempting to believe that those who refuse to hear these spirits
singing have themselves no souls, but we must not judge, we must
leave room for revelation. Everything connects. Webs and orbs
and lyre-spiders who weave them. Atoms of everything, whirling
in apparent silence within these fossiled stones, glint and spark
in light cast by the voice of the son of dreaming. His torn limbs
cast upon waters and forest floor. Orphée retrieves his own bones
and sinew as he picks up another fallen treelimb to weave
a newer lyre. Look, will you not: gold leaves glow
in the last rays of afternoon, below this hillside meadow,
and behind that is the whirling sparkle of molecules dancing,
and behind that the velocity of a shining planet, an orb
hurling itself into silence. We are the cliffs we jump from.
Our naked flesh breaks the laketop shimmer as we fall,
we disappear forever into that water mirror, then placidity returns.
Low hum of oceans singing in the blood, wind in the copper wires
of a sacred city, a lyre strung above dark streets the moon guards.
A forest of shadows grows within oil slicks reflecting streetlights
and trash bins. But in time, deep time, this forest made of bricks
will be overeaten and digested by new forests, returned and ink-vined
along borders of papyrus leaves woven into sheets of sand
by the lyre's unending song. The lowest string on a harp
of air and ice, the lowest tone that, struck,
can shatter crystal mountains. Wind strokes
the highest strings into humming.
Orpheus takes breath, opens his mouth to sing again.
What comes forth
shapes wind-blown broken sandflakes
back into mirrors full of starlight.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 4: Some Possible Directions

Sayings gathered at random, or in apparent sequence, that spark the mind and imagination, towards that place where image and word become one. You could alternate these thoughts with photographs, and perhaps I shall. You could interweave things in such a way that they would catch light, take fire, and awaken.

The true man sees what the eye sees, and does not add to it something that is not there. He bears what he must bear, and does not detect imaginary undertones or overtones. He understands things in their obvious interpretation and is not busy with hidden meanings and mysteries. His course is therefore a straight line. Yet he can change his direction whenever circumstances suggest it.
—Thomas Merton

The man of Zen sees what is there, not what he thinks is there. The man of Tao sees the currents under what is seen, sees what is true underneath the apparent surface of things, the illusion of Maya.

We know, don't we, everybody else's religion, mythology, and philosophy and metaphysics backwards and forwards, so what need would we have for one of our own if we had one, but we don't, do we?
—John Cage

Cage is correct when he points out that one very valid reason that people go looking elsewhere for spiritual or psychological fulfillment is because those things are lacking at home. We have lost our own myths. Our own major church institutions have ceased to serve their laeity and become rigid, authoritarian power-mongers. Some people do try to replace what has been lost with myths from other cultures. Some people, even some spiritual leaders, say you shouldn't do that. They say that you must learn your own root culture thoroughly, before you can understand any others.

I disagree. But then, I am a child of more than one culture, so I have found both rootlessness and home in more than one place. There was the culture I was born into, and the very different one that I grew up in, for those first formative years, those earliest childhood memories.

Tonight I am strongly homesick for India. I want to smell the spices in the markets, I want to hear the music, especially the singing voices. I am feeling homesick for a place I haven't been in a long time, but which has never really left my soul. I am an immigrant to my own birth culture, to which I feel far less connected to and rooted in tonight.

So even a spiritual leader telling me that I shouldn't feel homesick for India, when I live in the USA now, makes no sense to me. Do all the Indian immigrants here in the US, or in the UK, reject their homelands? Certainly not. Why should I?

What they don't understand is that you can be rooted in more than one place. There is nothing wrong in love. You can love more than one home, more than one family, more than one lover, more than one thing essential to your life. You don't have to choose between the spices of India and the love of a person here on Turtle Island. Although that second kind of love may not be for me; and in my homesickness there is also grief for what I will never have. Ganesha, Lord of Crossroads and Remover of Obstacles, bring me home tonight.

Are not some experiences so powerful and so profound (I am not speaking of the merely compulsive) that they repeat themselves, thrust themselves upon us, again and again, with variations and change, each time bringing us closer to our own most particular (and thus most universal) reality? We go, as Yeats said, from exhaustion to exhaustion. To begin from the depths and come out—that is difficult; for few know where the depths are and can recognize them; or, if they do, are afraid.
—Theodore Roethke

Fear stops us, usually, from becoming those things we most love, most want to become. Some experiences are so powerful that there are no words. Words fail us. Sometimes the heart becomes so full, flowing over with deep bright emotion, that nothing can be said. At those moments there is only silent praise, blessing lit by a sacred light from within. There is an evening of moonlight in your hair, with a lover's cup filled with white wine, and nothing to say.

Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear.
—Carl Jung

There is a profound loss of the sacred in our contemporary culture. A loss of the very sense of the sacred. This is not news: many have commented on this, for some time now. I make no new insights here. But it bears repeating. Especially when I can sense a way through art, through poetry, that leads towards the revelation of what is both immanent and transcendent of this moment. Probably the reason I can't convey the reality of this, to anyone who refuses it, is because words fail precisely at the threshold of revelation. The door into starlight is made of ivory, carved with beautiful names in runes you can only read once you pass the threshold.

Cannot art be a force for re-enchantment, a way back to the garden, a door into some myth necessary as breathing? Cannot making, as poets and dances are makers, be what ties us to the land as well as the spirit?

As the carver holds the unworked ivory lightly in his hand, turning it this way and that, he whispers, "Who are you? Who hides there?" And then: "Ah, Seal!" He rarely sets out to carve, say, a seal, but picks up the ivory examines it to find its hidden form, and if that is not not immediately apparent, carves aimlessly until he sees it, humming or chanting as he works. Then he brings it out: seal, hidden, emerges. It was always there: he did not create it. He released it: he helped it to step forth.
—Edmund Carpenter

I feel this way about every piece of driftwood I pick up, turn over in my hands, and know that someday I will find something in it to carve. Every piece of wood drying on the workbench contains some form to be revealed. I just have to wait. The woods tells you what to make of it.

Surprisingly, and in contradiction to conventional literary wisdom about intention, so do words tell you what to make them into. Tonight a meditation, some other night, a poem. Conscious intention, the will to power, to have power over the tools, power over the direction the words go in—none of that comes into play, here, nor does it matter.

The poem was always there: I, this "I" that thinks so highly of its own will, did not create it. At most I released the poem from the word-horde, helped it to emerge. The music steps forth best when I hold its hand but don't tell it what to do.

In other words, while retaining our private experiences, we can attempt to incarnate myth, putting on its ill-fitting skin to perceive the relativity of our problems, their connection to the "roots," and the relativity of the "roots" in the light of today's experience.s.
—Jerzy Grotowski

I go to an isolated place, a crevasse or cave or mountaintop. I take a small stone rub it on top of a larger stone. I am rubbing the stone. After days of rubbing the stone in a sunwise direction, a spirit emerges. It comes out of the rock and faces the rising sun and asks what I want. I then die in the most horrible torments, body ripped to shreds, skeleton scattered across the landscape. But then I am gathered together again, later in the day, my body reassembled out of new bread, and I am whole again by dawn.
—anonymous shamanic narrative of initiation

Let there be fog      And let there be phantoms,
Weird marvels      to baffle your hunters.
—from Njal's Saga

Avatar: some meditations

Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron, 2009.

This isn't that kind of review. I'm not interested in writing that kind of review, here or ever. I am not going to spend time picking apart the technical details and elements of the movie, or presenting myself as some sort of film critic. I'm going to spend my time focusing on the mythopoetic and archetypal aspects of the plot, the context, and the characters of the film. On the mythopoetic level—all other debates about its merits aside—this film succeeds very well indeed.

1.

Criticisms have been made that it's not all that original a story. (Remember, originality is the Modernist golden calf, to be worshipped and honored before all others.) There are in fact many similarities to existing story types. John Smith meets Pocahontas and is educated in the ways of survival in the New World. Aliens vs. natives; natives vs. invaders. The US Cavalry vs. the Comanches or Apaches (cavalry films are a particular subset of the Western genre, with unique tropes). Giant heartless corporate greed vs. compassionate independence, which prevails against all odds. The alienated or wounded war veteran, formerly an outsider, who becomes an insider among those he is supposed to be oppressing. The mere soldier becomes a spirited Warrior. Echoes of Vietnam, echoes of the Middle East conflicts. The hero's journey to come of age, to come into his own adult sense of responsibility and power. And of course the love story: the deep encounter with Other. Disaffected, alienated soldier, sick of and sickened by his own militaristic culture, meets the natives, and "goes native." (Perhaps Dances With Takara might be a fitting title.)

Why does the film resonate with so many other stories? Because each point of resonance is a mythic or archetypal turn. The film is built on archetypes, not on conventional dialogue or character or plot. It's a human story, but it's not a human-centric story. (Except of course that all stories are human stories, if not human-centric. As poet Muriel Rukeyser once said, "The universe is made up not of atoms, but of stories.")

We can talk all we want about the technical or purely filmic aspects of the movie; we can decide which succeed and which might have been done better, or differently. I have some thoughts on those points, which I may not get to here. But the issue of originality is a bit disingenuous. Other famous and influential films have been equally based on older stories, older myths, to no harm, and in many ways to their virtue. It doesn't matter: sometimes hte oldest stories are still the best. The point isn't that it's the most original script ever written, but how well it was executed on film. And this particular version of these mythic stories is very well-executed indeed.

Those who insist that this isn't an original enough script are looking to find fault. While on one level they might be right, they're also completely wrong. Movies, like novels, are myths: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories told in Avatar are myths.

There are worldwide myths (Greek, Hindu, etc.) in which "avatar" is the word used to describe a god embodied in human flesh: the divine spirit enters the body. This myth in two senses comes literally true in this movie: through the Avatar technology, which is neurologic telefractoring into another (cloned or genetically manipulated) body; and the moment in the plot when the Hero attains the pinnacle of the natives' achievements, by bonding with the most wild and powerful and dangerous of the planet's flying beasts. (Whose name translates as "Last Shadow," meaning the last shadow you see crossing over you, before you are taken. In other, older myths, what has sometimes been called a Deathbird.) The hero is both an avatar, and becomes a divine avatar; his journey of self-discovery, of empowerment, is a journey also of becoming divinely blessed. In the case of Pandora's sentient ecosystem, Eywa, quite literally.

The archetypal stories and situations of Avatar are numerous. To my mind they're the reason for the film: more of a reason than the ostensible plot, which is admittedly thin at points, the characters (some of whom admittedly are not very 3D), or the somewhat predictable chain of events. Predictability is no sin, by the way, unless you worship at the altar of originality. Children want to hear the same stories told to them over and over again in part because they are predictable. I saw many plot turns coming a long time before they actually arrived; but that didn't bother me, as they were the necessary enacting of the archetypes and myths in operation. The pleasure of the retelling of the old stories is in the details surrounding the predictable, though, in the precise workings out of each archetype, in the little character moments and throwaway lines that flesh out the people in the story who are acting out the archetypes.

2.

I didn't watch the film in 3D. (Yes, I know, I missed out, dude.) I never got to the theatre during it's 3D release, largely because I was on the road at the time, and no theatrical-release films had my attention, for several weeks. I never watched the film in theatrical release at all, to be honest. I was traveling. I was making my own art at the time, on a creative roadtrip. (Isn't it interesting how judgmental some people can get when you don't keep up with the latest cultural trend or tickle of the moment, as though you were missing out on all of life by missing out on what's the newest popular entertainment? One wonders at times if that isn't overcompensation for a deep, unacknowledged sense of the hollowness and soullessness of such pursuits and trends.)

And anyway I'm not sold on even the newest 3D technology. I'm still not sure that it isn't just another fad, another gimmick, experiencing a wave of popularity that won't endure past the "gee whiz!" period into a genuinely artistic period. (Not that there have no good 3D films made recently; Coraline was sublime.) I am turned off by the cheap tricks that a lot of films use. I tend to like to wait for a new technology to be used to make art, not just used to show off.

I'm told that Avatar uses it's 3D conservatively: as though you were looking through a window onto a world. There are no intrusions that break the fourth wall into the movie theater's space over the heads of the crowd in front of you; my least favorite gimmick of 3D, to be blunt. The choice in Avatar was to create depth of field, not make the audience gasp in their seats with a cheap trick. Knowing the filmmakers involved, I accept the probability of this being true.

3.

I tend to be a quiet fan of James Cameron films. I tend to like most of what he does, most of the time. The first time I saw Terminator, I felt changed, if only for an evening, the way a great film is supposed to get under your skin and change you. (Cameron has always worked with grand archetypes in his stories.) I came out of the movie theatre with my friend, unable to talk—about anything, not just the film—which happens to me after the most moving times watching a film. I let myself get immersed in the film, and the shift back to the "real world" can take some time, when the film is particularly immersive or overwhelming or life-changing. (My DInner WIth André shut me up for a whole week, more or less.) I came out of the movie theater, after watching Terminator, at night: down the street was an idle road construction site, lit surreally by the sodium and mercury vapor streetlights, with a few big diggers and tractors parked next to the broken road and the revealed dirt beneath: a miniature post-apocalyptic sketch of dread. I kept my eye on the digging machines, afraid they might come to dangerous life, and attack, like the technology is the movie. I skirted around them and stayed on the other side of the street. My friend laughed in sympathy, but that's how much the film got under my skin, that first time.

I never watched Titanic, and I doubt I ever will. In some ways it says a great deal about our culture that Cameron's most popularly conventional love story film has been his most commercially successful. (The stories we like to tell ourselves about ourselves are not always life-changing, but re-affirm the status quo.) I have no doubt it's a very well-made film. Yet I find myself uninterested in Titanic, the popular movie, and far more interested in Cameron's documentary work, alongside Dr. Robert Ballard, in discovering and filming the actual Titanic wreck in the deep waters of the cold North Atlantic. The side-films, the documentaries, the preparation work, the undersea filming that Cameron did for the actual discovery of the lost ship—all these are more compelling to me than the love-story movie. I'm just not conventionally sentimental or nostalgic, I guess.

I think Cameron's masterpiece is probably The Abyss. In its own way, as deeply an innovative a film as has ever been made, both in terms of the undersea setting and filming, and of the encounter with the alien Other. (Are all Cameron's films about the encounter with the Other? A case could be made for that, even for Titanic, which is also a story critiquing social-class stratigraphy.)

Strange Days, which Cameron wrote but did not direct, is an interesting little film, that I think often gets overlooked. It exemplifies what Cameron films often do: blend genres. Strange Days is a film about the apocalypse in both its positive and negative connotations, and it's also a murder mystery. Terminator is the modern (postmodern) Frankenstein, while also being a meditation on love and death and impermanence.

The newly released DVD of Avatar is no-frills. It's just the movie, with a commentary track. There is no second DVD of special features, making-of documentaries, and so forth. And the DVD release is not the 3D version of the film. One wonders if there will be an extended director's cut released later. Cameron has done that before: The Abyss was a full half hour longer in extended release, and that actually made it a much better film. Perhaps a similar version of Avatar will someday be released, with special features, and the option to view it in 3D at home. Maybe even a digital copy of the 2D version, for your portable player; those have become very popular lately. The gods forbid we should not be able to go one moment, or to one location, where we could not be somehow entertained.

If I were to wish for an extended cut of Avatar, what I would want would be: more of the small character moments that flesh out the film; some more on the science behind the film (is that flux vortex which creates the region of floating mountains a geomagnetic or gravitational/tidal or even more exotic phenomenon?), including some more on the biology of Pandora; and more scenes of Jake learning to go native. That part of the film I would have liked to see a lot more of, at least another ten minutes or so of film-time. The process of learning to live in a foreign culture is always interesting for me—having done so myself a number of times. It would also have been interesting to see more of jake's video logs, in which he begins to question himself, and lose his former sense of self, the process during which he becomes made anew; this process of losing the self to gain the self is another deeply mythic part of the hero's journey. It's sketched out in the film, but my own peculiar constellation of interests made me want more.



4.

Entertainment is not art. It's the dead detritus of art congealed by marketing and the economy of scale to maximize profits for some at the expense of everybody else. Art is life: entertainment is death.

I don't think Avatar has pretensions towards being High Art rather than entertainment. Yet it is artfully done, and at times is so breathtakingly beautiful that it approaches the threshold of art, even toes over it. The night scenes in the planetary jungle, with many colors of bioluminescence, some of them activated only by touch, are particularly lovely. The sheer profligacy and variety of species and elements at times overwhelm the foreground action, and I lose track of the love story because I'm watching the background. The realization of the world, the power of the details, are what give it believability and resonance. It is truly a Paradise: an Eden, an unspoiled place in which all beings live in relative harmony.

It is at night, in the film, that the message becomes most obvious that everything on this planet is connected by the neural bonding fibers: the entire ecosystem is sentient. Eywa is Gaea writ large. One short speech even makes the comparison between the living Eywa, the soul of Pandora, and the Gaea spirit of Earth, which humans in their manic exploitation have perhaps succeeded in murdering. The ecological message is rather blunt, then; yet within the action's context, I don't feel preached at, just strongly reminded that maybe, just maybe, it isn't too late for Gaea after all.

5.

Yes, there's a bit of exoticism in the film—the encounter with the Other—which I have to say has been emphasized in the way the film's been marketed. Merchandising makes the producers of any film a lot of money, especially in science fiction. So there are lots of Navi trinkets and action figures available. Did Dances With Wolves get so much exotic marketing? Not much, because the producers intended to be respectful of the First Nations depicted in the film. The Avatar merchandising is more akin to Star Wars style merchandising, even while the film's marketing posters and graphics echo Dances With Wolves: the Other who is ourselves, we who appear to be so different but whose hearts are one.

Exoticism and colonialism go hand in hand: the dominating colonial forces are always in conflict with the Other, in part because they project onto the other all their own dark, repressed traits. Hence the natives get called "savages" or "primitives." They are technologically inferior to the colonizing paramilitary forces, certainly; on the other hand, the more complex the toy, the easier it is to break. Technological civilization has often been seen as the dominator, colonial force; and it has often been successfully resisted by the natives. There are echoes of the unhealthy US Cavalry incursions into First Nations geographical and conceptual space presented in the last act of Dances With Wolves. Again, these are mythic echoes, not literal quotes or references.

One plot-point the movie leaves open, at the end, when we see the lines of humans being force-marched into the space shuttle to be evacuated—or to be exiled from Paradise—is the tendency of large corporations, when the natives win a battle, to return later with overwhelming force. The British Empire was built very much by the British East India Tea Company, ruthless in their suppression of local uprisings that interfered with their profits.

So Pandora remains a threatened Paradise, not a permanent one. A subtle nuance of the film is that there are no permanent Paradises: the Hometree is destroyed, a sacred site where the natives can connect with their ancestors via bonding with the ecosystem's neuro-fibers is also destroyed. An entire tribe is made homeless. We can only live in the moment, with the ones we have right now, today.

6.

I have no grand conclusive statements to make. no quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down recommendations (with all their subtle echoes of Nero's gladitorial coliseum). I leave other viewers to decide for themselves how well they enjoy the film. For myself, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the DVD, and expect to watch it again soon, picking up more subtle details that I missed the first time through.

James Cameron continues to make films I want to watch. As I said above, a case could be made for all of his films being mythic encounters with the Other—both the Other out there, the truly Other, and the Other we find within ourselves. The question as to which Other, the inner or the outer, is the more alien, lies at the heart of Cameron's films, as it does here in Avatar.

What the Bee Knows

My favorite honey is from bees working basswood (American linden) trees: dark, rich, sweet, flavorful. Basswood is also one of my favorite woods for woodworking projects: light, strong, very fine-grained, pale but lightly honey-colored. I have a custom-made worktable made from basswood, adjusted to my height, that allows me to stand upright and write or work on art projects without any back or posture issues.

Your average supermarket honey is still honey, usually clover honey, but what I love best is the honey from individual beekeepers selling their wares at the farmers' markets, or small local shops, or similar-scale venues. Local commerce. My favorite candles to burn are handmade beeswax candles; the scent is divine. I make candles from time to time; when I make beeswax candles, I tend to make them for myself rather than to give away. Then there's the whole thing about the healing properties of honey, in various uses and cultural systems.



PL Travers is one of my favorite essayists and writers. Her "thinking is linking" style has had an impact on my own essay style. Of course, she's best known for creating Mary Poppins, but I think the numerous essays she did for Parabola Magazine are essential reading. Since 1976, when Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition began publication, Travers was a regular contributor and consultant editor. In 1989, a collection of her numerous essays from Parabola (with a few from other sources) was published as What the Bee Knows, Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story. This is one of my treasured books; it's long out of print, but if you run across it, wade in and be glad.

The title essay, "What the Bee Knows," was originally published in Parabola, Vol. VI No. 1, February 1981, in the issue themed on Earth and Spirit. This remains one of the best documents on the significance of bees that I've ever encountered. Travers begins this luminous essay completely sideways, an essay tactic I adore:

“Myth, Symbol, and Tradition” was the phrase I originally wrote at the top of the page, for editors like large, cloudy titles. Then I looked at what I had written and, wordlessly, the words reproached me. I hope I had the grace to blush at my own presumption and their portentousness. How could I, if I lived for a thousand years, attempt to cover more than a hectare of that enormous landscape?

So, I let out the air, in a manner of speaking, dwindled to my appropriate size, and gave myself over to that process which, for lack of a more erudite term, I have coined the phrase “Thinking is linking.” I thought of Kerenyi—“Mythology occupies a higher position in the bios, the Existence, of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, storytelling or any other art.” And of Malinowski—“Myth is not merely a story told, but a reality lived.” And, along with those, the word “Pollen,” the most pervasive substance in the world, kept knocking at my ear. Or rather, not knocking, but humming. What hums? What buzzes? What travels the world? Suddenly I found what I sought. “What the bee knows,” I told myself. “That is what I’m after.”

But even as I patted my back, I found myself cursing, and not for the first time, the artful trickiness of words, their capriciousness, their lack of conscience. Betray them and they will betray you. Be true to them and, without compunction, they will also betray you, foxily turning all the tables, thumbing syntactical noses. For—note bene!—if you speak or write about What The Bee Knows, what the listener, or the reader, will get—indeed, cannot help but get—is Myth, Symbol, and Tradition! You see the paradox? The words, by their very perfidy—which is also their honorable intention—have brought us to where we need to be. For, to stand in the presence of paradox, to be spiked on the horns of dilemma, between what is small and what is great, microcosm and macrocosm, or, if you like, the two ends of the stick, is the only posture we can assume in front of this ancient knowledge—one could even say everlasting knowledge.

After this, Travers gets into bee lore per se, but always with a slightly sideways skew to her viewpoint. This is the essence of poetry. I always think of what E.M. Forster wrote about the poet Constantine Cavafy as

a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing at a slight angle to the universe.

It seems to me that poets always stand at a slight angle to the universe. Travers most certainly did as well as Cavafy. Whenever I re-read one of her essays, I often feel my own perspective has shifted somewhat; a thing to seek out, for poets.

Later on in her essay, Travers talks about talking to the bees, as well as listening to the news they give us of the land, the soil, the sky, and the earth itself; bees are keepers of the earth-knowing:

But this apprising of the bees, telling them, for all one knows, what they already know, is not the business merely of great ones. The bees are constantly being told. No beekeeper would fail to do it. For if they are not courteously kept informed of everything that happens, they will take umbrage, swarm, and fly away, or die of grief or resentment. In the British Isles and all over Europe, the folk continually keep the bees abreast of the news, at national as well as local level; decking the hives with crepe or ribbon, whichever fits the case. On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a headdress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. “But you surely don’t need a hat, Aunt Jane! They’re only at the end of the garden.” “It is the custom,” she said, grandly. “Put a scarf over your head.” Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then—“I have to tell you,” she said, formally, “that King George the Fifth is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides,” she added—as though the bees needed the telling!—“everyone has to die.”

Again, at a wedding reception in an Irish garden, I found the gardener, a family retainer, morosely surveying the scene. “All this colloguing and gallivanting, and never a word to the bees!” he grumbled. “Why not tell them yourself?” I asked him. “Is it me to be doing such a thing? It needs to be one of the kin.” “Well,” I told him, “the bride and the groom are my godchildren. Would I be near enough?” “Ah, you would!” he said, with a brightening eye. “Yer a bit of a bee yerself.” So, puffed up with this piece of flattery, I went and told the hive and it hummed. The news would be spread abroad and doubtless commented upon.

And this leads her eventually, circuitously, her essay following the bee's own weaving path—thinking is linking, after all—to the heart of the matter: that we must have the earth-knowledge, the chthonic myth-knowledge in our bones, in order to live:

Our profane life is full of these hidden meanings, of clues that we are at pains to find but pass by, not knowing what to look for—or, more exactly, how to let meaning discover us. For this to happen we need to become aware, as our forefathers were well aware, that by the fact of being born, each of us has assumed a place in the cosmos and is part of all that is. But not only that.

Myth, by design, makes it clear that we are meant to be something more than our own personal history. It places us—and it is not a comfortable position—squarely between the opposing forces that keep us, and the world, in balance—the two Earth Shapers, benign and malignant, checking and disciplining each other to produce a viable whole. One has only to think of Prometheus, forethought, and Epimetheus, his unfortunate brother; or Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, the light and dark of Zoroastrianism; of the Hindu Vishnu and Shiva, preserver and destroyer; of the Navajo Water-Child, born of the rivers, and Monster-Slayer, born of fire—the cool flowing sap of one and the solar heat of the other; the angels and devils of Christianity.

How pleasant it would be, and easeful, to be able to choose between them; to fall to one side or the other and so escape the conflict. But the myth allows us no soft option, at any time in our lives. A child of three once said to me, “I am two boys, Goodly and Badly.” Alas! too young for this, I thought, but at the same time realized that truth requires us to be young, no matter what our age. And then came the faltering, anxious question—“Which do you like best?” I knew the answer, and all the breadth and depth of it, but I had to appear to pay it mind. If I chose Goodly, then Badly would be in the wilderness, alone with his badliness and lost. If Badly, then Goodly would be in the same plight, alone with his goodliness. “Joy and woe are woven fine/A clothing for the soul divine.” “To tell the truth,” I said gravely, “I like them both the same.” The look of anxiety turned to relief and a trustful hand met mine.

We are both light and dark, Ahriman and Ormazd. We are both the Hunter, Orion, and the Seven Sisters, the Pursued, the Pleiades, the Sisters pursued into the sky.

Myth is essential to us: we must always be aware of it, and of its story in our lives:

For if man does not, of intention, enact it, keep alive its rituals, preserve unbroken the chain of its being, myth will enact itself through man. It is doing this now, all over the world, with ambivalent intensity—the tidal wave of births and deaths; the devil invoked in the name of God; instant heroes and instant villains; gods masquerading—myth has its wit and irony—as Chairman, President, or Mullah; Persephone abducted to the Underworld, eating the symbionic pomegranate and her mother searching for her child through the California fields; the Great Goddess rising in wrath, dressing up as female priest or terrorist; she who is terror as well as beauty—the Hindu Kali, the Celtic Morrigan, La Belle Dame Sans Merci—and be her very nature priestess with no need of dogcollar to proclaim it, is calling herself, not such honorifics of nobility as Gaia, Isis, Hecate, Hera, but Women’s Liberation. All these show myth in action. For good or ill? That is not the question. It is always for good AND ill.

And at last, Travers reaches the conclusion of her pursuit of myth, by returning to what the bees know, and can tell us:

So, we are left in question, which is where the myth is designed to leave us. Time, space, and matter are mutable realities. The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the stone temples are, all of them, ultimately, as flimsy as London Bridge; our cities but tents set up in the cosmos. We pass. But what the bees know, the wisdom that sustains our passing life—however much we deny or ignore it—that forever remains. Begotten, not made, it is here to declare to us, in the words of the old Greek poet Aratus, that “Full of Zeus are all the ways of men.” That word “full” means what it says, and therefore, with the ambiguity of myth, reminds us, too, that the sky is always falling, that the bough inevitably will break and the rain it raineth every day.

What does one do with these trifles, not unconsidered, that are snapped up from the bloodstream? Throw them back, as the fisherman does the riddler, to let them grow and breed! So—I toss them into a tributary of that whole planetary vein, that flows just around the corner; from which, long wandering beside it, I have learned so much. And also thrown into it so much—lamentation, doubt, question, gratitude, and joy. Let it all go, river, to the sea to be made over, absolved and dissolved, suffer the sea-change and return as bee-stuff.

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song!

Bees are also symbols for industriously accomplishing the impossible. Witness the long conundrum in science of understanding how the bumblebee is able to fly; for a long time it was a great mystery. It was only high-speed stop-motion photography that allowed us to understand that the high wing-beat-rate was how it was possible at all. But the improbable mystery remains.

Then there is pollination. Bees are not the only pollinators, no, but they are the major pollinators, worldwide. They gather and they pollinate; so all bees are essentially "honey" bees. (Talking myth here, even if science disagrees.) So: symbiosis with the rest of life; without them the plants would have a problem. Bees also furnish food, and prey on other insects, as part of the food chain. Bees that nest underground help churn the soil, over time, and replenish it. So: fecundity; life-force; nourishment.

Bees are another sign of spring, of life returning to the land. Like the first robin, the first redwing blackbird, the first crocus flower poking up through the snow or carpet of last year's leaves, sighting the first bee of the season is a revelation, and an affirmation. I haven't died. The world is coming back to life. Maybe someday I will too.

As Ted Andrews says in his book about totem animal powers, Animal-Speak:

If a bee has shown up in your life, examine your own productivity. Are you doing all you can to make your life more fertile? Are you busy enough? Are you taking the time to savor the honey of your endeavours or are you being a workaholic? Are you attempting to do too much? Are you keeping your desires in check so they can be more productive? Are you taking time to enjoy the labors and activities you involve yourself in?

Bee is obviously about celebration and organization, too. They live in organized colonies, with social, sexual, and functional roles laid out clearly; a diverse yet purposeful commmunity. Bees tell us that we can all live together in harmony, however impossible that sometimes seems. Perhaps the way to do that is to dance the bees' dance, orient ourselves to the sun, moon, and stars, center ourselves and our lives around Spirit and the Goddess (the Queen Bee), and work together in community. The Celtic tradition says that bees are the secret wisdom coming from the other world. In Jungian as well as Celtic terms, the archetypal perfect society is centered around the Queen, the Great Mother, paying homage to the sun in sacred dance, and producing from the fields and woods a substance that can both feed and heal and intoxicate.

Then there's mead—fermented honey. Mead is one of the oldest fermented alcoholic beverages in the world. Some recipes still in use are truly ancient: old enough to out-date the first cities. So: celebration. When we see the Queen Bee as the Queen of Faerie, then perhaps judicious draughts of mead might assist the "second sight" or the celebrant's transition to the faerie world Underhill.

And wax: for polishing, for light, for many other uses including waterproofing, threading needles to make clothing. And the antiseptic and medicinal properties of honey were surely known to the Old Ones. To think that we mostly usually it only for a sweetener these days! Wax for candles casts the smell of beeswax throughout the room, an intoxicating, sweet scent that opens the mind as well as the senses.

The bees humming and buzzing, thrumming and churning. The soft hum lulls us to sleep, and draws us into the Dreamtime, into the dreamworld, the Summerland, paradise. In the Welsh bardic tradition, a harp is known as a teillin, which is altered form of an t-seillean, "a bee."

Bees benefit from blossoms, practice useful things, work in the daytime, do not eat food gathered by others, dislike dirt and bad smells, and obey their ruler; they dislike the darkness of indiscretion, the clouds of doubt, the storm of revolt, the smoke of the prohibited, the water of superfluity, the fire of lust. —Ibn al-Athir

Our relationship to the bee is very old. Bees appear in ancient sacred geometry, maps, and earthworks. Who knows? Perhaps early humans, at the start of the agricultural revolution, when they started banding together in communities, noticed that the bees were also banded together in communities. Maybe they studied them as models of community; hence, the early usage of bee-symbols as far back as human temple architecture goes. Perhaps we were influenced to form communities because we noticed other communities already existed. Bees are certainly agricultural role-models, on some levels.

So, what the bee knows is what the earth itself knows. We must continue to talk to the bees—but we must also listen. There is lore the bees can whisper in our ears. Let them land on you, don't brush them off from fear. Let them crawl into your ear and whisper-buzz that ancient wisdom, that quiet voice that only comes to us when we sink most deeply into time, into the sinking and cooling that is Mystery, that is the Godhead, that is what the bee already knows is there.

Flowers & Swords

This photo, of Japanese swords and bright flowers together in a red frosted-glass vase, has been one of my more popular yet also controversial images. It has created its own history, independent of the moment it took me to make the arrangement and photograph.

I was operating a sales booth at a visionary-art show at a well-known new-age center in Minneapolis in 2004, and I had a large print of this photo on a display stand at my booth. It's an image I had taken in the studio about a year beforehand. I didn't sell a single thing at that show, which was my typical experience for doing art fairs and other shows the entire time I lived in Minnesota. My art just doesn't fit with Minnesota, I guess; too visionary, too strange. When I moved to New Mexico and later California, after living and not thriving in Minnesota for several years, it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds—perhaps literally, but certainly symbolically. I had been personally invited to show my work at this particular show, and gone out of my way to prepare for it; so it was a disappointment to not sell anything. I did do some smalls trades with a couple of fellow artists at day's end, art for art, each of us bartering our wares to the other.

The responses that this image raised at that art fair—the last fair I ever participated in, in Minnesota, come to think of it—were emblematic.

There were during the afternoon two women who kept coming back to look at the photo. Both of them talked to me about their responses.

One woman was a warrior-type, clearly an experienced martial artist who knew how to deal with swords; she was also a drummer in drumming circles, and we had a lot in common. She was intrigued by the photo, and almost bought the print. I didn't mind when she didn't, however, as I had enjoyed the conversation.

The other woman roamed around the room several times, and kept coming back to stare at the photo of the swords and the flowers together. Finally, when I asked her what she thought of it, probably the fourth time she'd been by to look at it, she said, "It really scares me, yet I find it compelling." She was afraid of it, but couldn't take her eyes off of it. I asked why. She said because it was a powerful image that combined both the potential for violence and the present beauty of the moment.

For me, this was profound and valuable feedback, and I said so. I love getting this kind of honest response, even if it's a response not ultimately supportive or positive. That the artwork has gotten under someone's skin, and made them uncomfortable, in my opinion, means the artwork has succeeded—succeeded just as much as if it had been praised or lauded or generated some kind of ecstasy in the viewer. Art is disturbing, and supposed to disturb. Art isn't soothing, safe, or easily digested. Art should make you ask more questions than you have answers for.

This photo of swords and flowers, for me, was about bushido, and the samurai's Zen-flavored awareness of the terrible beauty of life: it's awesome beauty, and it's inevitable ending. There is an awareness of the intense beauty of existence that one feels at the edge of losing life. It's an existential, sudden intense awareness that life is amazingly beautiful and meaningful. As the saying comes down to us from the Native American elders who once were warriors: It is a good day to die. Another similar saying that comes from the samurai goes, When you know you are going to die, you can accomplish anything. One can do the impossible.

All these associations flashed through my mind in the moment it took to originally make the photo, which was in fact a fortuitous accident, as such things often are. A great deal of my artwork arrives like a lightning stroke, like the strobe of a lightbox in a photography studio, and it might be years till I figure it out. If I ever do.

What was interesting to me about the responses these two women gave me at that no-sales art-event was that both of them, in different ways, embodied the ambivalence of approach/avoidance. The first woman was mostly compelled to approach, mostly fearless, still a little hesitant. She seemed clear that she wanted the art, but didn't know how to fit it into her daily life; she acknowledged her inner warrior nature, but didn't know how to display such knowledge in her home, her office, her daily life. Her hesitance was in the area of figuring how to best integrate such art into her regular routines. The second woman was in some ways a classic repressed housewife type, with mousey dark hair and a sallow complexion, whose life was more likely ruled by fear than by sensuality; yet she was drawn again and again, as if desperately seeking out her own inner warrior. I sensed something very strong and unbreakable inside her, even though the face she presented to the world was a shy, fearful, timid, even fragile one. It is always amazing to get those quick glimpses of something behind the eyes, that is indestructible.

This was a lesson for me in some of the ways that art can be transformative; in different ways for different people, to be sure, but speaking to our darker hearts, our inner selves—speaking directly, bypassing the logical coping mind, the conscious ego-interface that drives us from home to work and gets us through the navigable wastelands of the everyday. Art that bypasses the conscious, chattering monkey-mind contains a charge of numinous energy, a dark aura of power. It can raise atavistic fears, as it raises the hairs on the back of your neck; our species was once a prey species, and we still remember those runs for safety. It can also raise the shadows of predation, those darker selves that enabled us to survive, even if we repress them now for the sake of getting along with others in civilized company. Civilization can be a veneer, but it can also be a choice to not-kill, just for today, to not-hunt, just now, just right now.

My own art and music have often been called transformative, archetypal, mythopoetic, shamanic, etc. It's a label that took me a long time to embrace. I'm not into the soothing, almost saccharine visions of much new-age artwork; I spend a lot of time bringing the shadow into the light, and that shows up in the art. You can almost always spot an artist who has been through the dark night of the senses, the dark night of the soul. There's an intangible mark on their artwork, a presence, something mysterious lingering like an aura of light or dark. You want to see what's on the back of the painting. You want to know more, and more, and you never reach the back wall of the cave.

Flowers and swords: the yin and yang of life and death.

This Writing Thing (after the Fox)

Just because we can have fun with this doesn't mean it's not serious business. Sometimes the fun and the business are the same. Sometimes you feel manic, out of sorts, out of control, standing aside while someone or something else is in the driver's seat, but knowing it's all going to work out perfectly, so just hang on for a wild ride. And you trust it, even as it rocks you world.

That's the lesson of the Trickster, the Heyoka, the reversal clown, of Coyote, of Raven, of Anansi, Reynard, the Kitsune: it's all serious fun, and seriously funny, yet also, funnily enough, it's serious.

This afternoon I stood at the window, talking on the phone with a close friend whom I love, looking out at the recent showfall that had covered the land, making land and sky that same white color again. I stood at the window, looking out, chatting away, and a red fox walked across the frozer river, up the opposite bank, and into the graphic-pen brush of the woods on the floodplain over there. I gasped. It was a beautiful sight.

Suddenly nothing else mattered. The miscommunications and declarative bullshit that had been the nature of human relations in my orbit all this part week; the misunderstandings and umbrage taken; the hard work to make things happen in the next phase of my life, after the death of both of my parents in less than a year's time, and everything else that had been making me crazy for months—none of that meant anything. A red fox trotted across a white snowfield and into some black trees. That's all. That's enough.

I've written before about encounters with nature, and about foxes. I have encountered them several times in my life, as well as coyotes, wolves, and other wild canids. There is something special about encountering a fox: it's always quick, always fleeting, sometimes very playful, and often a shock to the expectations. Seeing a fox is always a pleasure.

One time, driving in eastern Wisconsin in the early evening, I passed a field of hay that was standing tall and tan, probably due to be mown soon. There was a gap in the hay, a driveway into the field for a tractor, a truck, a combine; just a little gap, about the width of a car. As I flahsed past at speed, I saw there in gap, dead center, a fox sat on its haunches, tail wrapped around its paws, mouth gapped in a fox smile, tongue lolling, nose up. It looked very pleased about something. As I drove on, not daring to stop or even slow down, I saw the fox get up, self-possessed as you please, and trot across the two-lane highway to disappear into another field across the way. It was as if it had been sitting there, waiting for the traffic to clear, calm as you please, like someone waiting at a crossroads for the traffic lights to change so they could at the intersection. And gone into the evening's blue light.

In the time it's taken me to write about the fox, the light outside has gone from white to the deep blue of dusk. Will I see the fox again? I don't know. But I'll always look for it, now.

white sky, white land,
black trees, brushwork on paper—
the strolling red fox

How To Make It Never Happened

Poet Steve Parker asks:

I've got this image building to do with archaeology. I saw a documentary a while back about the excavation of a neolithic site in Southern England. The workers there reassembled thousands of shards of knapped flint back into whole flints, and found holes within them: axe-head shaped holes, obviously. I love the idea that fragments from a site or a moment can be reassembled, and that a hole can be found within, a man shaped hole, perhaps, or a hole in the shape of an emotion, if only those fragments are assembled correctly. Is that what poetry is? The reassembly of a few puzzling fragments to reveal the shape of those holes, and what may have dwelt therein? This story can go anywhere, of course: I enter a room and see various things strewn across the floor. The moment has gone, but what will I find if I reassemble those things? What shape will the hole be at the centre of the assemblage?

We can look to archaelogy for answers to this, but we can also look to physics:

The present moment is the only thing that is constricted to a single possibility, one per universe. In either direction around the single moment, forewards and backwards in time, light-cones of probability spread outwards, expressing possibilities both real and non-real; we glow with particles decaying from probable quantum states into solid fact. Each second, we leave a person-shaped hole in the fabric of spacetime, around which light spits and sparks, a light-cone of choices opening up before us, even if we are apparentally unmoving.

Even if you do nothing, and are a still point of detached non-action in the universe, you have to keep choosing, continuously, to exist or not. This applies to animal choice as well as conscious choice, and when we are possessed by forces from our shadow that make us do things we do not want to do.

Each ray of light a possible outcome, a choice about to be made, that collapses from potential into actual only when we choose. Echoes of choice remain, in the lights that follow us, as memory, as regret, as knowledge of other universes opened up when we made other choices than the ones we now remember having made. The past is as malleable as the future. We can remember it together. We can go back and make it never happened. (The apparently odd syntax is deliberate.) The past only appears fixed because we imagine our presence has left a hole in it, a hole shaped exactly like the choice we made to get we are now, shaped exactly like memory. So, sparking, we interact, kindling little fires; we merge and separate, and leave trails of light in the spark-chamber, like the accelerated particles we are: particles of the mind of God. We see forwards by the light of our own being, the headlights of our choices emerging from our core and illuminating the roads ahead. This road curves and sparks, too, as it converges and diverges from other roads, each road the trail of a life.

Retroactive myth is ritual that clears the emotional bonds that keep us locked in the past; those bonds that keep us believing that we cannot change the past, even though we can always change how we re-experience the past, and interpret it; we can let go of the emotion and just retain the data, for example. This is redaction of the past, or creative mythology, the latter a phrase of Joseph Campbell's, the former a concept from archetypal healing. Campbell made the point several times that not only are we always living in mythic time, we can't get away from it. The moon landings were mythic; so were the losses of lives during the two space shuttle explosions. Movement in time is the same as movement in space, since according to relativity spacetime is one; there are no divisions. So, a staircase to the past leaves a hole in the air, and a man walks backward to the explosion that gave him birth, one second at a time, from the event that threw him forward.

The problem is with our perception: we are culturally educated to perceive time as unidirectional and non-redactable once past; both of these are culturally-bound suppositions, myths if you will, that dictate how we tend to perceive things, yet are not deterministic, and do not hold true on the quantum subatomic level. The rules are different, there in the edges of the universe: the edges, because anything smaller than a certain size—the grain of the universe—can be said to not be in the universe. Down in the quantum foam, there are innumerable wormholes between here and there, foaming up and falling away. Perceiving this, even in translation, gives insight into the past, into action and consequence, and into how the observer's choices do affect reality at some level. We can choose to see what we choose to see. The making of myths is telling the story of ourselves to ourselves.

Why can't the potshards pull themselves back together into the pot? In some version of the universe, it already has. It's not miracle or magic, if it's possible in some quantum state. Although, of course, it is sublimely magical just to be alive. Even if there are holes left in our selves—our memories, our hearts, our souls—that are unhealed, there are salves for the wounds, and bridges around them. The broken ancestral pots still breathe. The universe is porous.

Visionary Poetry 8: Keeping room for Mystery

Perhaps the cultures that still allow visionary poetry are the ones still closest to vision, still open to magic, the unexplained, the Mysteries. Those cultures that can still point to a rock or tree or building or mountain, and say, "The Divine lives there." Perhaps these cultures are indeed primitve, and undeveloped, and unenlightened—if only because they are not yet made self-conscious and self-aware in the way of Modern and post-modern Western civilization.

But perhaps the judgment of so-called "primitivism" is, after all, a parochial and misinformed judgment made by the "developed" countries for largely superficial reasons. Perhaps it says more about those who make such judgments, than it does about those being judged.

Even in our enlightened, developed, rational culture, there is room for the sacred and the visionary. Children lead magical lives, full of fantasy and wonder, till we train it out of them, and teach them to disbelieve in the fantasies of childhood. At a certain age, you're expected to stop believing in Santa Claus, and the rest—and grow up. But in our pursuit of rational adulthood, perhaps it would be wise to retain some of the magic of childhood, to keep life in balance.

This is not sentimentalism—I am thoroughly and permanently opposed to all forms of sentimentalism and nostalgia. I am not speaking of cheap and easy sentiment, or cuteness, or childishness. I am speaking of childlikeness—like unto a child one must become, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Many of the mystics, in their poetry and other writings, say that the Kingdom of Heaven is right here, right now. If only we'd wake up to the fact that is already present, within us, and all around us. It is only a short step to enlightenment. We are already there, if only we'd realize it.

Perhaps one of the functions of visionary poetry, ridiculed as it often is within our rational-scientific, technical, non-magical culture, is to remind us of what we lost, when we gave up magic (one of the original meanings of eros) in favor of logos and technos. There is no doubting the great achievements made in technical and mercantile culture by the Western cultures since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. But even today, many scientists question the wisdom of advancing technology without also advancing a moral compass, an ethic; witness the testimonies of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, and Einstein's own reservations about the technology his physical theories helped to create.

Perhaps the function, and purpose, of visionary poetry is to remind us that there other ways of constructing reality, and other windows through which to see the Universe. Not to discard what has been won, through long years of research and development—not to discard it, but to complete it, to give a human soul to the Golem's manufactured flesh, to breathe life and peace into the made-things that all-too-often have brought us only death.

•

A quote from poet Robert Duncan:

Myth, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Milton, was the poet-lore handed down in the tradition from poet to poet. It was the very matter of Poetry, the nature of the divine world as poets had testified to it; the poetic piety of each poet, his acknowledgment of what he had found true Poetry, worked to conserve that matter. And, for each, there was in the form of their work—the literary vision, the play of actors upon the stage, and the didactic epic—a kind of magic, for back of these forms we surmise distant origins in the rituals toward ecstasy of earliest Man. Once the operations of their art began they were transported from their sense of myth as literary element into the immediacy of the poem where reality was mythological.  —from The Truth and Life of Myth, p.39

Visionary Poetry 5: the Bardic tradition

A poet-critic states: "All the other art forms draw on poetry for the visionary." This comes back to the argument that poetry is the highest artform, which I have already stated my opinion on.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting idea: the shaman-poet, the bard, the teller of tales, the skald, inspiring the other arts.

I think it probably does happen, but no more than any of the other arts inspire poetry back, on this visionary, shamanic level. I'm thinking of some great ekphrastic poems over the centuries. The track of visionary poetry, music, and artwork through the centuries has several threads, which sometimes separate for awhile, before weaving together again. There are threads that go back to the Paleolithic era.

I think you might make a case for some of these inspiring, visionary shaman-poets of the past being Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Coleridge, Longfellow, possibly Browning. Each of these has inspired other artists. it's a short list, though.

In the modern era, I think the direction of influence is harder to support. Pollack, brilliant as he was as a painter who innovated, was pretty much an illiterate lout. van Gogh wasn't much better, and despite the record of his letters, he was remarkably inarticulate at times. Gaugain you might be able to make a case for; he was a reader of literature, and a writer, too; his diaries of Tahiti are interesting reading. I'm a big fan of Andy Goldsworthy, he's influenced my own art directly, but in all the books of his I've read, seen, or interviews and videos I've seen of him working, poetry doesn't seem to be in there anywhere, except for when Goldsworthy puts in his own pithy aphorisms.

If anything, Rilke was more influenced by artists, such as Cezanne and Rodin, and the Picasso of the "Saltimbanques" era, for the Fifth Duino Elegy, then he ever influenced visual artists in return.

I think one might be able to make a case for the visionary modern lyric to be present in pop music writing, which has been suggested; but even there, I think it's a limited case. I do not place Bob Dylan in as high esteem as many others do; nor do I think he's a visionary poet, in any realm other than the political/social. Granted, there's a bardic/skaldic thing going on with Dylan, and some real smarts, which he often seems to want to hide, but visionary poetry is only rarely social or political. (Neruda is occasionally visionary; but mostly late in life, and not so much in the political poems.) Except that they are both engaged with social justice, Dylan and Eckhart and Merton are all very, very far apart, poetically. Neither do I place Leonard Cohen in this category. I can see putting in Joni Mitchell there, and Bruce Cockburn. I might nominate Johnny Cash, for fulfilling a bardic function in society. But this might all be personal taste, on everyone's parts.

As for rock & roll, there's ekstasis and eros there aplenty, but a lot of it never rises above the level of the crotch, and a lot never achieves the sublime level that includes the crotch and more than the crotch. R&R is usually content to "be bad," to act out, and rebel, and very little of it ever achieves genuine emotional depth and maturity. Like atheism, rebelling against something only affirms the thing one is rebelling against, and rather than tearing it down, it serves to entrench it deeper. The rock artists who do get there, on occasion, all seem to come from the singer/songwriter direction, such as Cockburn or Paul Simon, or Robbie Robertson. Within "pure" rock, if there is such a thing, I might nominate Jimi Hendrix.

Frankly, I think there's a much stronger bardic/skaldic thread running through contemporary folk music, now and 50 years ago, then there ever was running through crotch-oriented R&R. But again, all that folkie protest music is mostly limited, and by its own choice, to the social justice arena. The genuinely visionary needs to be about more than social justice, although it includes it. It also needs to include the via negativa, the dark night of the soul, and the via positiva, the exaltation of all Creation, what Rilke means when he says that "A poet muct praise."

I know of a folk musician who's a genuine visionary: Gordon Bok. His "tellings" are directly in the bardic lineage, and each and every one of them is compelling, mysterious, visionary, even downright otherworldly.  

Now, some people say they remember the songs of their rebellious youths as the anthems of their lives. I do remember the music of my youth. But, because I am who I am, I admit it's usually the tune I can recall, not the lyrics. Perhaps that's why I remain a musician first, and poet third.  Actually, that's not accurate. More accurate to say would be that a song is music-and-lyrics; in a great song, you can't divorce the two into separate arenas. (Many a great song lyric doesn't hold up as a poem on the page, and is not as alive in that presentation as it is sung.) When pop or folk songs appear in my memory, they indelibly appear as words-and-music combined.

i think you might make a case for all the other arts being influenced by poetry, with poetry as the paramount visionary art, but it's a case that's limited to the far distant past. If you're talking the Paleolithic dawn of civilization, or even ancient Egypt and Greece, I think a case can be made for it; even more so for pre-Christian Europe, the Celtic shamanic ancestry which became subsumed into, for example, Irish religious practices, as Christianity spread across Europe after the 4th century A.D. But even in those ancient cultures, poetry was never divorced from music: lyrics were sung, songs were chanted, poetry was a living vehicle of expression, not words on a page. Even some of the Pharoahs were themselves illiterate; after all, they had as many scribes as they needed.

I don't think you can limit intuition to just the poets. Intuition is a universal, human birthright. It's a trainable skill; this is a pragmatic truth that has become quite evident in the past few decades, with the release of formerly-hidden threads of mysticism into the wider mainstream, a process which began in the 1950s. There are plenty of artists and musicians whose intuition is directly tied to the source, so to speak, without the mediation of poetry.

So, it's a very interesting idea, but I think it has many limits in application. I'm more likely to subscribe to a multi-valent, multi-dimensional schema, in which everybody influences everybody, everyone is influenced and influences in return. Both/and rather than either/or, as has been said, is a key paradigm for mysticism, visioary work, and shamanism.