Tag Archives: consciousness

December 2, 2009 · 4:13 pm

Dark Side Of The Moon

The moon is full today in Gemini. Skies sparkle with movement. When Uranus goes direct that means surprise reversals. And good news arrived last night.

I had talked in the afternoon with my friend Shaun, who was distraught. Her parents’ dog—a miniature dachshund named Emily—had been lost in the woods. Intrepid Emily was in the habit of going off by herself, but this time she did not return. Shaun feared Emily had fallen prey to a Great Horned Owl. After searching the woods and leaving messages everywhere, Emily’s human family sank into despair. Days went by with no sign of hope.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” as my Emily would put it.

The not knowing what had happened, the mystery of Emily’s sudden and inexplicable absence was the cleaver that smashed everyone wide open. Then a few hours after I talked with Shaun, I opened my email to find a message from her. Emily had been found! Picked up on the side of the road by a nice family who had taken her to Banff. Emily, who had been having a rough time of it, would spend the afternoon at a spa, having a facial and a pedicure. Her humans would retrieve her soon. (Okay, I added this last part about the spa.) Shaun wrote: “I don’t know what to say.” I don’t know what to say either. Except maybe: Thank you. For all the Emilies, thank you.

My Emily has this to offer today beneath the Gemini Fool Moon:

#450, c. 1862

Dreams — are well — but Waking’s better,
If One wake at Morn —
If One wake at Midnight — better —
Dreaming — of the Dawn —

Sweeter — the Surmising Robins —
Never gladdened Tree —
Than a Solid Dawn — confronting —
Leading to no Day —

If you are lucky enough to be one of those people who lives in the world of daylight, waking is preferable to dreaming. Because in the daylight, you know what you’re dealing with. Everyone obeys the laws of physics. And the shocks are at least real, rather than surreal.

If you are not one of those people. If you are a poet, say, like Emily, and you are more alive and awake in the dark of midnight, then your reality clicks into place only when you are dreaming. Such a person is actually living on the dark side of the moon. She is more in her skin when her eyes are closed than open. Such an existence, says Emily, is only viable as long as each day leads her to another dream. Her life depends on the continued movement of the earth around the sun. Just like ordinary mortals. The difference is that she cannot grasp what is worthy in those daylight hours. Her hands only know how to pick up the nighttime knitting, when the rules change. Nothing is solid. The dead speak. Her mind stands in many places at once. And she can see through walls into the heart of any question. Furthermore, no one wastes her time with foolishness, lies or fear. No one else lives on the dark side of the moon with Emily. She’s out there by herself. Fortunately for us, she is willing to send us letters from where she lives, so we can know what it’s like over there. And we know she’s all right.

Wise As The Wind

Uranus stations direct at the end of Pisces. What does that give us? Lightning bolts shooting out of the fog. Like a haunted cloud. Dangerous and potentially deceptive. In the end, illuminating. Emily offers the following:

#417, c. 1862

It is dead — find it —
Out of sound — Out of sight —
“Happy”? Which is wiser —
You, or the Wind?
“Conscious”? Won’t you ask that —
Of the low Ground?

“Homesick”? Many met it —
Even through them — This
Cannot testify —
Themself — as dumb —

Something has died, a thing beyond her grasp. She was not able to resuscitate it. What ever this “it” is. The question in these lines that lingers in my thoughts is “Which is wiser — / You, or the Wind?” All these words “happy”, “conscious”, “homesick”, are conditions of human life. The poet wants to know, “So what?” It is dead, and if it is dead, then so what?

She scares me sometimes when she does this. She renounces common grammar along with ordinary human attachments. You know the ones I mean. The hunger we have for meaning, for the happy ending where it all comes out right and proper.

Instead Emily bores down into the words to a level so unadorned that she rids them of any influence or prejudice. Sentence structure always has an ulterior motive. Some yearning or unseen agenda. She is trying to boil the language clean of all that. To set the words on the page with the same direct purity as the wind blowing across the hillside.

She’s doing this, I fear again, because there is something in Emily that dreads being human. That seeks an utterly unadorned existence. Why? Partly she is driven by her own neurotic curiosity. She needs to see what it’s like. And because she can. Sheer talent drives her. She has to explore the extent of her own power and courage to descend into purity of expression. If nothing else, for the sake of finding the outer boundary of her own genius. Because it’s there.

Also she dreads and sheds these adornments because they are too sweet for her. The pain of losing this sweetness is unbearable. The shadow side of her genius.

Grammar makes suffering of us all.

So who is wiser? You or the wind? Who would you rather be? Your self with all your sticky, stinky assumptions? The creases that hold decaying matter that rots your soul as surely as the teeth drop from your head? Or would you rather slip across the page like the wind? Like air moving in a smooth, unending stream that catches nothing in its way because it is as no thing itself? Which of these possibilities seems the wiser? She poses the question as if we had a choice. To be wise as the wind. Or remain as foolish as we are born.

Oddly or maybe not, the wind this morning is bringing down all the red leaves from my crepe myrtle tree. The flowers are long dead. We move toward the winter solstice, burrowing into the dark. Who says we don’t have a real fall here in New Orleans?

The Devil Beats His Wife

Still catching up on this Saturday morning. On the eve of the momentous Saturn Pluto square. Today is a good day for rosemary butter cookies and something my sister calls “girl comfort tea”. Here is a report from my notebook that has been gathering dust since middle September.

#950 c. 1864

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Sunset hence must be
For treason not of His, but Life’s,
Gone Westerly, Today —

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Morning just begun —
What difference, after all, Thou mak’st
Thou supercilious Sun?

I hate it when cliches turn out to be correct. Or even useful. But I guess that’s how they get to be cliches. What a difference a day makes. Yesterday I didn’t see much point to anything. Today I think I can figure it out. Forty years ago I was afraid of fireworks. Today I still don’t like them. Not much has changed except that I don’t have to be put in my bed screaming and crying because I am terrified of loud noises. So, that’s progress, right?

This morning the sun shines and there is a little spray of rain falling through the sunlight. They say when it rains while the sun is shining that “The Devil is beating his wife.” I have no idea where this came from, but I like it. It connects the natural world with some other mythic world. People go around New Orleans saying this all the time. A woman I used to work with was fond of making this announcement. As soon as she saw the rain coming down with the sun shining through it, she would step out onto the porch and say out loud to anyone within earshot: “Yep, the Devil’s beating his wife.” She said it with satisfaction, as if the Devil’s wife deserved a beating. And she enjoyed being the one to call it. She’d stand there and speak it into the sky with grim pleasure. Why this satisfaction in knowing what this peculiar event signified? She liked knowing there was something to say. Something she had always heard being said by her mother, her grandmother, aunts and cousins.

Whether you actually believe in the Devil or his connection to the rain and sunshine, doesn’t matter. What matters is that you live in a circle of people who attach meaning to freakish events in nature and go around saying so. That makes it true. The truth is what a majority of people say is true.

So the Devil beats his wife today. The blackbirds have disappeared from view. Honestly they are gone, really gone this time. Have not seen them for a couple of days. Pffft! As if they’d never been there. The tricksters from the murk below conscious understanding have packed up their bags of yakety-yak and flummery and moved on to torment some other soul.

What a difference a day makes. What do you have to say about it, thou supercilious sun? (Emily loves those sssss . . . sounds. She is giving voice to the snake at the back of her throat.) Today the sun looks down on puny humans, hurrying to and fro. Making meaning, writing myths. Attaching stories to the concrete world out there. All the while looking down his nose at us, amused, supercilious. How absurd and brief we are. How limited in comparison to the vast sun. Good thing He likes us . . . at least . . a little bit . . . maybe?

Tag Archives: consciousness

Dark Side Of The Moon

Wise As The Wind

The Devil Beats His Wife

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