Turtle Was Gone a Long Time Volume 2 E-Book

John Moriarty

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1997

Beschreibung

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the second volume of a remarkable trilogy, continues John Moriarty's spiritual journey embarked upon in Crossing the Kedron. In a Prelude to Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the author poses two questions. Are we the iceberg into which the earth has crashed? Have we lost, or did we ever acquire, evolutionary legitimacy? Moriarty goes on to question the axioms and assumptions of the late twentieth century and to suggest other cosmologies, myths and metaphors through which we may 'walk beautifully upon the earth'. Mediated through poetry, philosophy and literature - from the sacred writings of Christian mystics to coffin texts of the Egyptians and cradle texts of the Navajo Indians - Moriarty transforms humanity's Pequod voyage of self-destruction into an Ishmaelite quest for Divine Ground. In his call for cultural regeneration, the author invokes alternative tongues, Native American and Hindu, shamanic north and classical south. Readings from Meister Eckhart, Malory and William Law, Pascal and Melville, Berkeley, Blake and Black Elk, Darwin and Nietzsche, the Bible, medieval morality plays and the Mandukya Upanishads guide us along ancestral trails in dialogue with 'the great tradition'. With exhilarating singularity of vision, Moriarty offers readers paradigms of co-creation and self-interrogation, and through a process of calling-to-witness makes manifest ways of being in the world. 'White-water rafting with John Moriarty down the canyons of the collective psyche, even those readers who don't fall off and drown will have their preconceptions and perceptions scoured to a dazzle. Rifling the philosophies and mysticisms of East and West for his idiosyncratic vocabulary, he confabulates a Christianity that has sprung from its Old Testament bindings and opened its pages to the visions of the shaman and the silences of the Buddha, this is not a treatise on myth or comparative religion; it is in itself a mythic and religious intervention. Even dissenters like myself can be profoundly grateful to John Moriarty, for he has gone farther down the backstairs to hell and up the front steps to heaven than most of us will ever dare to follow.' - Tim Robinson, Irish Independent 'It is hard to imagine any Irish thinker not being excited by this book. When one considers the vapidity of what passes for contemporary religious thought and the pettiness of so much of our poetry, the appearance of Moriarty on the scene is dramatic.' - Brian Lynch, The Irish Times '...an extraordinary book. He has journeyed back into our mystic past and discovered our buried undergrounds which sprout much of our day-to-day behaviour. It has to be savoured slowly and thoughtfully, and the reward is rich.' - Alice Taylor, The Sunday Tribune

Leseprobe

TURTLE WAS GONE

A LONG TIME

Volume Two

THE HORSEHEAD NEBULA NEIGHING

John Moriarty

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

DUBLIN

Introduction

SERVING AS BOTH PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE

Q. In what way or ways does this second volume move forward from ground occupied or reached in the first?

A. Given that the concern of this book is with movement essential not with movement local, it doesn’t move forward in the obvious way that a narrative poem like ‘The Ancient Mariner’ moves forward, episode by distinct episode. And yet, tacking this way and that, but mostly becalmed, it is a voyage, through shipwreck, to Buddh Gaia. Strangely, it is when we are standing still in the doldrums that we make most progress. Movement local denied us, we are plunged into the very rough, inner seas of movement essential, the paradigm of which in this book is the Triduum Sacrum. It isn’t only the individuals on board who undergo this voyage of transformation, however. Their religion and their culture, each in its most fundamental assumptions and axioms, undergo it also. For this is the voyage of our Hebrew and Greek estimation of ourselves and our world. In particular, it is the voyage of our psalm eight and second stasimon estimation of ourselves and our world. Poetically imagined, it is a voyage in five tall ships – Argo, Nave, Mayflower, Beagle and Pequod. Pursuing the harpooned Cetus Dei, it sails self-destructively into the Sea of Typhoons, it sails out of Time into Tehom, and, in the long, acosmic night, it re-emerges as the Maidu raft.

One of the generating theses of this volume is that modern Western culture is Pequod culture. Portending doom as we round the Cape of Economie Good Hope, a phantom laugh has echoed upward from the hold and, like erinyes unafraid of our threatening clamour, sea ravens have settled on the rigging.

In all of this we are re-engaging with a central theme in the first volume. There too we dealt with this voyage into self-destruction. And there, too, continued in Big Mike rowing himself out into the Night of Brahman, it became a voyage of transformation:

They that go down to the sea in ships

And find, off course, no near landfall

Find more than Job, my dear brethren,

The terrible scriptures of water and squall.

More numerous than the desert sand

A remnant shipped for the Promised Land

And swelling our sails two thousand leagues out

The wind was still all word of mouth.

The full moon wore a dark half shawl –

Though our masts stood stately and tall

It was, if you like, an ominous sea

And like women the waves at a well in Galilee:

The troublous gossip of water, that’s all

Our dreaming senses heard out there:

Birds left no footprints in the air.

Suddenly then the beasts were shod,

The sun came up like a firing squad

And as if our ship was a drifting wreck

The Beasts of the Zodiac walked the deck.

Into the waste, month after month,

The skyline pulled back the battlefront;

Though our prophets proclaimed

The Beasts were from God,

That our masts would lie down

With Yahwehís rod,

Flashing about the scything prow,

The rotted cords, the rusted nails,

Whoever made the distant plough

Wields it now

Like a cat-o-nine-tails.

Tomorrow at dawn the high ocean begins,

We shall know whether God or the water wins,

The only thing Christ deserved was our sins.

It is here, our voyage becalmed in these great waters, that this second volume begins. As it turns out, it isn’t a negative calm. It is indeed the calm of Tehom and in it we hear the birth of the universe or, in cittamatra terms, the birth of awareness-of self- and-other-than-self.

In it we hear the Horsehead Nebula neighing.

Q. Is it so that Western culture sailing into the sea of Typhoons has its analogue, indeed its real meaning, in Narada walking into his initiation?

A. As phantoms went aboard the Pequod so, somehow, has Narada come aboard our voyage. Maybe he was always on board, biding his time below waterline. Hitherto suppressed or kept at bay by our cultural immune system his time has come. Breached when the Beasts of the Zodiac walked the deck, that immune system was an open Thermopylae to him and there he is now, outcast no longer, standing before the mast. Looking at him, we know that he is portent. Looking at him, we know that what happens to him will happen to our voyage, will happen to our religion, will happen to our culture. Like Noah, Ahab anticipates:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.

Ahab’s response to this his apocalyptic insight, or should we say, Ahab’s response to the abyss he has broken into, is Mesopotamian. He turns this threat to his sense of himself and his world into a Tiamat that he must do battle with. But there is a better way, a Christian way, and this being so, it might be that, suppressed for three or four centuries now, Jesus will also come up from below waterline and looking at him we will see something of ourselves, something of our own transtorrentem destiny. Looking at him, we will see Tenebrae not Tiamat, moksha not Middle-Eastern myth. So yes, it is true. However careful we were to exclude them, some phantoms did come aboard our modern voyage. Could it be that religion will erupt among us again? Could it be that Albatross and Whale will return to guide us? Could it be that the Doldrums is in fact the Carrol Cruising Ground and for those who have eyes to see it, there it is, the Spirit Spout:

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and by their soft suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence not a solitude: on such a night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

The Cetus Dei who would lead us to a vision of the Earth as Buddh Gaia, to a vision of the universe as Bodhi Tree.

Q. It sounds like the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. Do you think of what you have written as a Book of Exodus?

A. Biblically, exodus suggests enormities of direct, divine intervention in human affairs:

For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from the one side of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it? Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of fire, as thou hast heard and live? Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to all the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?

It is religiously difficult for me to claim it, but it is true that the Book of Exodus does underly what I’ve attempted to do. The volume begins with a Horsehead Nebula – the one out of which I imagine that our solar system has evolved – it begins with this astronomical Equus Dei neighing a mahavakya into our cosmic origins. Hard upon this, two stories come into our world. Their coming is like the coming among us of Moses and Aaron. Like Aaron and his wand is Narada and his ropesnake. With his wand, Aaron opened a path through the Red Sea. With his ropesnake parable Narada opens a path through consciousness-of. Walking dryshod through the Red Sea, the Children of Israel came into the Desert of Zin. Walking dryshod through the deluge of consciousness – of, or if you like, walking dryshod through the world-illusion, Narada would lead us into Nirvikalpasamadhi.

I often think of Cortez in Mexico. In our calendar, he went ashore there in 1519 AD. In the Aztec calendar he came among them, they thinking of him as a God returning, in Year One Reed. Very obviously, Year One Reed was a year of awful transition for Aztecs. Could it be though that Europeans must now undergo a Year One Reed? Could it be that humanity at large must undergo a Year One Reed? If not, what chance does the earth have? Imagine it: circling the sun, a terribly destroyed Gaia calling out, bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

It is in the shadow of two questions, not yet answered, that this volume was written:

Are we the iceberg the Earth has crashed into?

Have we, as a species, lost our legitimacy?

Certain it is that we need to bring the Harrowing of Hell back into our repertoire. Not just into our theatrical repertoire. Into our sacramental repertoire. We need that someone who is ordained to do so and who is therefore sacramentally protected will go down into the hold of our cultural unconscious and call out: ‘Lift up your heads, O ye Gates, and be ye lift up, ye Everlasting Doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.’

Assumptions and axioms of our Western way need to be harrowed. Our myths and our metaphors need to be harrowed. In the forms of our sensibility and in the categories of our understanding we need to undergo a 1519. Inwardly, in the depths of our being, we need to undergo a Year One Reed.

Initially in this volume Narada is our conquistador.

What, walking out of our Year One Reed, will we bring with us?

What seeds or intuitions of what new culture will we bring with us?

Q. In a mood of revolutionary anguish and fervour, Shelley wrote his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in a wood beside the Arno. The Oglala Sioux enacted Black Elk’s vision on a bank of the Tongue River. In your search for cultural regeneration, you go more readily to the Tongue than to the Arno, the Ilissus and the Tiber. You go more readily to the Aurignacian way of the Navajo and the Sioux than to the classical way of the Greeks and the Romans. If this is so, why is it so?

A. In the West, in our century, if someone suffers a breakdown or is afflicted by neurotic symptoms we tend to lie them on a psychiatrist’s couch and take them back to their childhood, the hope being that we will discover an unintegrated experience or fantasy or trauma that is giving rise to the trouble. It isn’t only individuals who break down, however. Civilizations break down. And so, standing under a hole in the ozone layer, it might be timely to lie our culture on a psychiatrist’s couch or, better perhaps, it might be timely to take Europa to Uvavnuk’s igloo or to Wolf Collar’s Blue Thunder Tipi, because sitting with her there, the old Pleistocene medicine woman or the Old Aurignacian medicine man might soon see that our Western voyage to calamity in the Sea of Typhoons was charted for disaster from the beginning. In the first page of our holy book we gave ourselves a divine mandate to rule over and subdue. This estimation of ourselves and our prospects was corroborated among the Greeks in Sophocles famous second stasimon. Second stasimon and psalm eight, that is the chart we would work with, and so begins our polla ta deina voyage – the ship that would bring home the boon became the very tall ship that would carry us to the farther shore, became the ship that would carry us to our manifest dystiny in a New Canaan, became the ship of science, became the floating try-works with which, the barrels ready, we would process albatross and whale, even Gaia herself. It is time, if we cannot yet harrow them, to nail psalm eight and the second stasimon to a Caucasus rockwall, or better, to a Golgotha rockwall.

I am of course reading these texts not as Heidegger would read them but as a capitalist would read them, or indeed as Prometheus would read them: eyes wide open to techne, closed to tolma, seeing the dreadnought not the nought.

Biblically insensitive to all forms of life that aren’t human, Habakkuk is outraged by demiurgic dominion only when it is exercised over other human beings. Speaking to his God, he says:

Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he? And makest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with the angle, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their drag: therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag: because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous.

The net and the drag. the stasimon and the psalm. And in the Spouter Inn, in an upstairs room lit by a spermaceti candle, Ishmael is looking at himself in a less than elegant mirror. Can you see him, David? And you Sophocles, can you see him? Can ye see that the harpooner’s poncho he is wearing is the skin of a sperm whale’s penis? Seeing him, can ye see the end of the whaleroad and the whale? Seeing him, can ye see the end of our Hebrew and Greek estimation of ourselves?

And as for Shelley – I imagine him writing his ‘Prometheus Unbound’ in the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford. It is with the quill of a very dead but very famous albatross that he writes it. It is by the light of a spermaceti candle that he writes it. But here they come, the first tumults of autumn and, even as he speaks them, the words of Prometheus gutter on the guttering page.

If harpoon-wounds alone were all that was necessary for it to be so, then our spermaceti candle would be out Paschal candle. But it isn’t. And every time we light it, the universe is a darker place. Indeed, I sometimes imagine that to quench our galaxy, finally and forever, all we have to do is light a spermaceti candle in it.

Agnus Dei

Cetus Dei

Albatross Dei

Longinus, Queequeg, Ancient Mariner: our three harpooners in their terrible Whaleman’s Chapel chasubles. It is of course the last rites of our civilization that they are enacting. Last rites that cannot give release, cannot give requiem.

When the whale’s viscera go and the roll

Of its corruption overruns this world

Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood’s Hole

And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword

Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?

In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat

The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,

The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,

The death-lance churns into the sanctuary,

Tears the gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,

And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags

And rips the spermwhale’s midrif into rags,

Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,

Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers

Where the morning stars sing out together

And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers

The red flag hammered in the masthead. Hide

Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.

Our Whaleman’s Chapel in New Canaan. Our new nave. Nave in which we sacrifice to our net, and burn incense to our drag.

And having sacrificed we set sail in our whaler and as soon as we have reached the high seas Ahab the captain comes up on deck and institutes a deadly eucharist. From the detached and upturned irons of the mate’s harpoons the harpooners drink the terrible grog – Ahab’s grog not Christ’s wine. Christ’s wine is Passover wine, it is the wine of our rite of passage from Fall to Recovery. Ahab’s grog is in every sense the reverse.

Ahab isn’t Antichrist but, letting the story grow as all great stories do, we can think of the ship as the Antiark, the Antinave, the Antiashram, the Antiyana – its mission to eliminate the Spirit-Spout from the world and leave us to the wonders of our humanist devices.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow , and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou

Who chariotest to their dark, wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth.

Awaiting that clarion, we should know that ours is a civilization of yu wei works and days, a civilization of fantastic second stasimon tricks:

But man, proud man

Dressed in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,

His glassy essence like an angry ape

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep.

It reminds me of a haiku that could yet serve as an epitaph to our modern way of being in the world:

The thief left it behind –

The moon at the window.

So yes, I seek for healing by the Tongue altogether more readily than I seek for it by the Ilissus. But the Illissus too. And the Arno. And yet, walking one day into the sixteenth century Italian room in the Louvre, maybe we will find that, tired of being our humanist mirror, Mona Melencolia Europa will have walked back into the stupendous world she has for so long eclipsed. Rivers like the Tongue there are among those mountains. Among them are rivers like the Yenessi. But when I think of final healing and final hope, I turn to the Kedron. In the spiritual geography of this book all other medicine rivers are tributaries of the Kedron-Colorado.

Q. Even the Yangtse and the Ganges?

A. The Yangtse and the Ganges have their gorges, their descents to Bright Angel. And the peoples of the Orient have religions that can watch with them. The Triduum Sacrum belongs to humanity, not just to Christians. It belongs as if by genetic inheritance to humanity in all ages, in all cultures. It belongs as much to Lucy as it does to Teresa of Avila. It belongs backwards in time as well as forward in time. It belongs to whatever depths, to whatever heights, Bright Angel Trail descends and ascends. Trilobite and toxodon crossed the Kedron with Jesus. Crossed it in him, he being Vishvarupa, he being Vishvayuga.

Q. You don’t only take Europa back to new infancy in igloo or yurt. As though she were Lyca or Little Girl Lost ,you find her and bring her to a Navajo hogan and laying her in a Navajo cradle you sing Uvavnuk’s medicine song to her.

A. We should think of these things as Dreamtime imaginings. In them we see the European psyche attempting to reach aboriginal ground and heal itself there. In a poem called ‘Turkey-Cock’, D.H. Lawrence has some questions to ask:

Turkey-cock, turkey-cock,

Are you the bird of the next dawn?

Has the peacock had his day, does he call in vain, screecher,

For the sun to rise?

The eagle, the dove and the barnyard rooster, do they call in

Vain, trying to wake the morrow?

And do you await us, wattled father, Westward?

Will your yell do it?

In the same poem, it being possible that the East [is] a dead letter and Europe moribund, he advises us to

Take up the trail of the vanished American

In this book it is assumed, with poetic licence, that in taking up the trail of the Native American we are also taking up the trail of our own Aurignacian ancestors. Beginning again after Gaia’s collision with the iceberg, we find that we aren’t wholly destitute. Our ancestral trail has brought us to a Navajo cradle, to a blue thunder tipi, to an Inuit medicine song, to the Oglala horsedance. It is assumed, again with poetic licence, that these elementary shaping shapes of culture belong to the Pleistocene, ancient and contemporary, indeed wherever and whenever it occurs. It is aboriginal ground here at home that we have come into. Here at home, now in our day, we can hear a Pleistocene song sung by a Pleistocene medicine woman in Altamira. Here at home, now in our day, a contemporary medicine-man who is nevertheless Aurignacian can sit in a blue thunder tipi in the Dordogne. Listening to the medicine song we know, sitting in blue thunder tipi we know, that neither psalm eight or the second stasimon is inevitable.

It is, in other words, a generating premise of this book that, after the collision, someone must dive to the floor of the abyss; after Auschwitz, Ta’doiko; after Hiroshima, the Navajo cradle and the Inuit medicine song. Inheriting these, we have as much maybe as Abraham had leaving Ur in the Chaldeas or as Aeneas had leaving his burning town. Or as Ishmael had, an ocean current carrying his raft out of the age of world’s night. It might be that we will survive the collision, will also survive our Year One Reed.

If Narada comes bringing the ropesnake so will Jesus come bringing the Tenebrae harrow. Thinking of him as a culture hero, I have sometimes imagined him inaugurating a Tenebrae Temple ethos which, for as long as possible, will resist the impulse to be yet another civilization.

Q. Are you doing what Plato did in The Republic, are you giving us the blueprint of a new socio-political order?

A. No. It would never occur to me to design a society as Plato did, or to write history all the way to its denouement as Hegel and Marx did. Jacob dug a well, and leading them to it, he watered his sheep and cattle. Jesus opened a seal’s breathing-hole in Time and, naively I suppose, I imagine all historical and geological epochs and ages coming to it, to breathe transcendentally at it. To it comes the age of the dinosaurs. To it come Periclean Athens and Renaissance Rome.

Oracularly, in his poem ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, Robert Lowell consoles us saying:

The Lord survives the rainbow of his will

He survives his biblical will as, after creating them, he communicated it to Adam and Eve; as, after the flood, he communicated it to Noah.

Not only does he survive it. In the Book of Job he reverses it. Job endures the reversal. In the deepest places of his psyche and soul he endures the crash of our civilization. In him it has crashed in its most fundamental assumptions and axioms. The questions this book asks are: what, walking away, will Job bring with him? And to what now, in all of us, are the seven gates of our modern minds wide open?

Still reeling from the idea that our God might have survived our holy book, that the Divine might have survived all images of it in our smoking mirrors, I have myself opened the small gate to my own small yard to the one who comes riding a donkey. Religiously for me, the Triduum Sacrum is, in a phrase of Wallace Stevens, the fecund minimum. And it might be that it is indeed the kind of minimum around which a people might organize themselves. I am thinking here of Pascal. Pascal distinguishes between a book accepted by a people and a book that creates a people. Could it be that Tenebrae is a ritual that might yet create a people? Could it be that, religiously and culturally, Tenebrae might yet be the strange attractor that we hear about in chaos theory? Could it be that, having Tenebrae, we have once again a centre that will hold?

Q.Can we therefore conclude that you have written an old-fashioned, biblical Apocalypse? Or, in terms more resonant with Nordic myth: has the whole book been written with a moulted wing-quill of one of the Ragnarok cocks – with a wing-quill of Fjalar crowing from the cross-beam of a gibbet, or with a wing-quill of Rustred crowing at the bars of our ecological Hell-upon-Earth?

A. That isn’t anything like the whole story, but there is, formally in the first volume, an apocalyptic calling to account. It occurs in a poem called ‘MissaTuba Mirum’.

Tuba mirum spargens sonum

Per sepulchra regionum

Coget omnes ante thronum

Hebrews, Greeks and modern Europeans come before the throne. As founders, agents and carriers of a particular kind of civilization they come before it. The judgement is simple: we are off course. At the end of the poem we are back in the shamanic North, we are back in the Pleistocene. And yet, even though the church tower has become an igloo, even though the Nave has become a Raft, we are still not destitute. In the igloo a medicine woman sings a medicine song and on the raft there is someone who is willing to seek regeneration for all things on the floor of the Abyss. The Pleistocene means Pleistocene healing. It means a Navajo cradle for the new humanity. It means fire sent down not fire stolen. It means blue thunder tipi. It means Black Elk’s theurgy. It means Black Elk, a Pleistocene thunder dreamer, praying for the Earth on a mountain peak in Paha Sapa. So yes, in some of its moods, the book is apocalyptically apprehensive. And that is why it wrestles at the foundations of Western civilization as a psychoanalyst such as Jung might wrestle at the foundations of an individual’s psyche. Into ground no longer occupied by the old cultural assumptions and axioms there is an attempt to sow other myths, other metaphors – those, if you like, that A’noshma returns with.

Q. Aeschulus also. He wrestled at foundations. And he tended to write trilogies. Is your trilogy a tribute? Does it attempt to continue his work?

A. I know that this will seem to contradict something I said in the Overture. but I’ll say it anyway: working our way into a flank of Golgotha, maybe we should chisel out a new Greek theatre in which to stage ourselves, in which to interrogate ourselves, all over again. I’m talking about an interrogation of ourselves as a species who have yet to evolve into evolutionary legitimacy.

Like Dionysus and his chorus of goatmen singing their goatsong, its beginnings could be, and maybe should be, primitive.

We could start with Jesus in Gethsemane. Jesus and a chorus of Grand Canyon Seafloors. In song and in dance they suffer with him. In song and in dance they interpret and make visible his agony. In him and in them we see our incohate but growing compatibility with the Earth as it so gloriously and ferociously is. In him and with him we acquire evolutionary legitimacy.

Q. It isn’t only Uvavnuk’s medicine song that is repeated again and again. In the work as a whole repetition seems to be a structuring device. Are there justifying reasons for this?

A. It isn’t by trying them on once in a shop that a new pair of boots will take on the shape of our feet or the shape of our walking. Similarly, it isn’t in a single encounter with it that an unfamiliar idea will take on the shape of our seeing and knowing. Or better: it isn’t in a single encounter with it that an unfamiliar idea will give new shape, new perceptive and cognitive shape, to our seeing and knowing. Particularly will this be so if the idea is subversively foreign to cultural and therefore also perhaps to personal predisposition.

Among wolves there are pack smells. Among cows there are herd smells.

It isn’t all at once and without challenge that such a smell is acquired. All the ideas, all the metaphors and tropes, and all the constituent parts of a book should have the herd smell or pack smell of that book. That a book should, in the literal sense, have such kindness among its parts is an essential aesthetic requirement. Think of the redactors who set themselves the task of giving to four distinct traditions that common, transindividual ethos that we think of as biblical.

As with a book so with a culture. If new, challenging myths come into a culture, both the culture and the myths must be given a chance to adapt to each other, must be given a chance to acquire a new, common culture smell. Otherwise, the new myths will be like animals in a zoo, fenced off from interaction with their environment. Another possibility of course is that the incoming myth will drive the indigenous myth underground. Like a man intent on setting up the Christian thousand year reich, this is what Milton envisaged on the morning of Christ’s nativity.

This book allows for a confrontation of myths, exotic and indigenous, and it fosters kindness, a growing into cultural kinship, among those that survive. Repetition in different contexts is a way of fostering such kindness.

But this isn’t the only nor is it the most important reason for the repetition.

In intention, if not in achievement, this volume is liturgical not literary. It is a kind of cultural healing rite. Writing it, I had the Sings of the Navajo in mind. Sings are healing liturgies that go on, some of them, for nine nights. They aren’t embarrassed, not in the least, by repetition. Indeed they rely on it for much of their effect and power. This they have in common with almost all liturgies, ancient and modern. To recite the Christian rosary in all its mysteries is to repeat the same pattern fifteen times. And it isn’t only once in the course of the Mass that we will hear

Dominus vobiscum

Et cum spiritu tuo.

In this regard it would be instructive to read the hozhonji song in the body of the text. Equally instructive would be any session of shamanic healing in igloo, tipi, hogan or yurt.

Take the Maori story of origins as an example:

Te Kore

Te Kore-tua-tahi

Te Kore-tua-rua –

I repeat these words as often as I do because I think of them as hekau, as words of power. In them is the hope of a new way of being in the world. In them is the birth of a world which by reason of its mode of emergence cannot but be hospitable to jnana yoga and Tenebrae. In them, speaking them backwards as sacredly as we speak them forwards, we seek to return divinely guided through night and void into the final exaltations that Sufis call fana and baqa.

It has been said that all art aspires to the condition of music. What I have written doesn’t aspire to the condition of art but in its own proto-liturgical way it does now and then aspire to the condition of prayer, and in some of its moods prayer is incantation. Relevant, if only distantly in this regard, is something Ted Hughes has said:

Those Greek plays were close to liturgy. The gods and the underworld were still listening, and it was intended they should hear. And not only in ancient Greece, but all over the world, in all places, at all times, whenever men try to reach the ear of spirits, or of gods, or of God, they use incantatory speech. They abandon all workaday tones and inflections – without which we human beings can hardly understand each other – and resort to this more or less frenzied plainsong. As if those spirits had somehow let it be known that they will listen to nothing else. And this is inborn. We all discover it the moment we need to pray.

Think of this volume as the protoplasmic matrix out of which a European Sing might one day evolve. Already, it aspires to be the groundwork for a hozhonji song that will take us to Buddh Gaia. Encountering them in that context, the repetitions wont seem so noisome.

Q. While your contemporaries travel by spaceship to the Moon and Mars you drift, longing for sacred sight of the sacred Earth, on a Maidu raft. Instead of giving wings to Icarus you weight A’noshma with a stone. Is it not a little like saying to the reptile, thus far and no further shall you evolve – into archaeornis you shall not evolve?

A. If, while I was in the womb, my umbilical cord had been cut, I would have been in trouble, wouldn’t I? Similarly, if my connection with the Divine is severed, there is essential nourishment I am not getting and whether I acknowledge it or not I am in trouble, and in this condition it matters not at all whether I am adapted to how things are on the Earth, on the Moon or on Mars. In no matter what galaxy, indeed in no matter what universe, I am, I am in trouble, and a source of trouble to whatever environs me.

Of Archaeornis and Icarus, or rather, of my attitude to them, I must ask: am I so excited by the plumage that I have forgotten the Mesozoic reptile in the singing or stooping bird?

In the hand is the fin. It is in it even when we are playing a piece by Mozart. And it is in the anguish of such self-awareness that we cross the Kedron.

For those who have crossed it, ‘Gethsemane’ and ‘Golgotha’ are big Darwinian words. But I should of course say, big post-Darwinian words, for although evolution has occurred and continues to occur, it hasn’t occurred nor does it continue to occur only for the reasons that Darwin elaborated. As Australian Aborigines who have remained in touch with the Dreamtime know: fantasy fathers fact. And to make ourselves available to Dreamtime is to make ourselves available to evolution.

Even if his wings are genetically engineered, Icarus will still be impious, a freak who has separated himself from the whole. Modern humanity is increasingly freakish. And what is freakish does not survive.

I sometimes imagine it: Ishmael, our most recent Deucalion, returns to the Whaleman’s Chapel. Invited to preach the sermon, he stands there, bleeding lance in hand, and says just that: what is freakish does not survive.

Heidegger says that in the age of the worlds’ night someone must endure the abyss.

For purely human reasons, indeed for selfish reasons, Gilgamesh endured it and, as we would expect, he lost.

For universal reasons, Jesus crossed the Kedron and, as A’noshma Jesu, he endured it, and with him there came ashore a new way of seeing and being in the world. That way of being and seeing this book would promote.

Q. But the diver myth is a myth and isn’t it therefore odd that you give it such a generative role in a book which attempts to grow into a truth?

A. Utnapishtim, Narada, Job, Jonah, Jesus, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete and Teresa of Avila – they and the tremendous transitions they underwent are as real and inevitable as the more visible, more common, more expected transitions of birth, puberty and death.

Freud, bless his heart, didn’t see much further than Oedipus, Narcissus and the socially and economically successful person in whom, for the sake of pulling together, ego and id have buried the hatchet.

I think of Turtle’s longing for worldly ground as the re-emergent phase of the Narada initiation.

Turtle was gone a long time. So long was he gone that by the time he returned bringing with him the seed or source intuitions of a world he could come ashore on – so long for all our sakes did he endure the abyss that he was covered, coming back, in green slime.

I imagine that as it dried out the slime shrivelled and shrank into a mahavakya, a permanent watermark in the inner and outer armature of his epistemological naive realism:

Yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat srinoti,

na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma.

In other words, Turtle’s experience of being grounded in and by a world was at best only provisional. A day would come when, as Narada did, he would hear the great question: did you bring the water?

I think of Descartes, Hume and Kant.

I think of Coleridge in dejection, of Arnold on Dover Beach and of Stevens in Key West.

And I wonder for how long more can we avoid the Narada initiation.

If the voyage of the Pequod is in any sense an analogue of Western culture since Descartes, then, simplifying things, a future Hegel or Spengler or Marx might be able to declare: like the story of the famous whaleship the story of the modern West is the story of a tragically mislived insight:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.

Ahab didn’t know Brahman. Nor did he know that the stupendous world that masks Brahman is also Brahman.

As for the implication in your question that myths are untrue. Certain it is that there are persons who endure the abyss. But the abyss isn’t an abyss of waters. And it isn’t godless.

Coming home at last to Noah in his ark the raven calls out

Tehom is Turiya

In the Ground of our being there is no enduring. There is only the One. Or should I say, in the Ground that Grounds our being there is no enduring, there is only the One.

To call Jesus A’noshma Jesu is not, I believe, to falsely name him.

Q. Is this the mythus that Carlyle called for? The myth that would clothe or reimagine the divine spirit in Christianity and make it religiously available to our perishing souls?

A. If only by way of initial or tactical concession to sceptical rationalists, maybe Carlyle was right to keep open or reopen a distinction between myth and matter-of-fact in Christianity. As I understand it, Christianity has its origin in experiential matter-of-fact – in the Gethsemane experience, the Golgotha-Borobudur experience and the Anodos or Easter experience, and just as it would be a poverty in our lives not to undergo puberty so would it be a poverty, altogether greater, not to undergo our transtorrentem evolution.

As experiential matter-of-fact, the Triduum Sacrum is as invulnerable as puberty is to rationalist attack by Voltaire, to Dionysian, instinctive attack by Nietzsche.

If, in imitation of Jesus crossing the Kedron, Dionysus decided to cross the Ilissus, and if, desiring someone to watch with him, he asked Nietzsche to drop his thyrsus and fawnskin and cross it with him, I think that by cockcrow next morning the philologists’ bluff might well have been called. And as for Voltaire – well, his waistcoat didn’t turn out to be as surprising as Pascal’s.

Once we’ve established what is matter-of-fact in Christianity, then we can open a world-wide door to whatever shepherds’ lantern might illuminate it for us.

Myths illuminate no less than lanterns do. And among the myths that will help us to articulate the Gethsemane experience will be those which are, in Jungs’ phrase, self-portraits of the instincts.

But, to cross from the Gethsemane phase to the Golgotha phase of the Triduum Sacrum is to cross from myth to mahavakya. In Tenebrae our myths and our lamps and our lanterns are quenched:

There goes neither the eye nor speech nor the mind; we know it not; nor do we see how to teach one about it. Different it is from all that is known, and beyond the unknown it also is.

The Gethsemane phase of the Triduum Sacrum is an evolution, the Golgotha phase is an involution. On Golgotha the psychic pleroma of Gethsemane finds itself looking down into its own empty skull. We are carried back not just to psychic but to cosmic beginnings. And that’s why, from the outset, this second volume so concerns itself with beginnings. That’s why it rehearses so many stories of origin, among them the diver myth.

It isn’t only among Native Americans that the diver myth is found. Different versions of it are widespread among the peoples of north eastern Asia. And who knows! It might have been told by a campfire in the Aurignacian Dordogne.

This is how the Yenisei Ostyaks know it and tell it: in the beginning there was only water, and hovering above it, accompanied by swans, geese, ducks, loons and other water-birds, was the Great Shaman Doh. Thinking that it would be good if there was land for him to come down and walk on and rest on, he asked diverbird to bring him soil from the floor of the abyss. Diverbird dove but after a long, long time came back with nothing. He dove again and, from the morsel of mud he eventually returned with, Doh made the Earth, a great island in the midst of the waters.

Like Great Shaman Doh and the waterbirds, modern humanity hovers above the Earth. We are losing contact with it. But unless we are to go the way of the dinosaurs we must come down and set foot, set descending finfoot, on Bright Angel Trail. If we wish, we can be lungfish not just to another stage of evolution but to release from evolution.

Q. Are you saying that a hitherto unheard of angel, an angel called Bright Angel, has drawn near? If you are, there are questions of some importance that need to be asked. Given that it is on the floor of the Grand Canyon that the encounter must take place, who among us is able for it? Are we as little able for his brightness, as little able for a new phase of evangelization, as we were when it was Gabriel who approached?

A. Often when I think of Michelangelo’s Mouscron Madonna I wonder what he felt and thought as he saw the new face of the Mother of God emerging from the stone. Like Mary herself in the presence of the announcing Angel, were there days when he was afraid? Did he sometimes think that a presence so heavenly might emerge that neither he nor we would be able for it? Were there days when he felt like Actaeon? Were there nights when he dreamed that he was a deer, howled at hugely, and then hunted down by his hounds?

And when he began to catch glimpses of the angels’ face, of the angels’ presence, in the Virgin of the Rocks, did Leonardo feel he had trespassed? Did he feel he had crossed a threshold too many? Thinking of the smouldering fire in Ancient Thebes, did he sometimes fear that he had uncovered a realm that should always be hidden, always be out of bounds, to beings who are still incarnate? Even while he was still painting Mona and the background to Mona, were there days when he prayed and nights when he prayed that God would be merciful, would re-create him like others, would restore in him the veils of protective blindness?

The God of the Bible was kinder, wasn’t he? He only called into being as much as we would be able for. But no, because that’s the old flawed view, the view that makes Man measure and master of the created world. As we know, God tested Job in this regard and Job, the representative human, was found wanting. And Blake was sure:

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the mind of man.

It might indeed be that Gods’ creative bounty has overflowed his mercy. And here we might recall that Hindus describe the origin of all things as a sristi, a pouring forth. The pouring forth of more than Arjuna was easily able for in Kurukshetra.

Arjuna and Job.

And Michelangelo? Was Michelangelo an Actaeon who painted his own portrait on his own flayed skin? And was that the price he had to pay for having lived so long with the seeing sibyls? For having seen what they saw?

It’s hard, isn’t it, to blame Mona Lisa for turning her back on it all. But that of course is a superficial way of seeing her.

She is the sibyl of what’s behind her.

And for as long as she sits there, mystifying us, she protects us from too naked a vision of what’s behind her. She makes what’s behind her partially bearable.

Viewed against what’s behind her, viewed against what’s behind the Virgin in The Virgin of The Rocks, much of European history is an impertinence

These paintings are immense openings in our European Great Wall. Openings Marco Polo didn’t walk through, Columbus didn’t sail through.

In the backgrounds of these paintings, art anticipates history. Or should I say, looking at these backgrounds, it is obvious that history has yet to catch up with art, and when in this case it does, if it does, it might be run down by its own hounds.

Leonardo has opened the way to Canyon Country, and when we cross into it, if we cross into it, our only hope is that Bright Angel, the Angel of the place, will welcome us, will walk with us.

So the answer to your question is yes. I do sometimes think that a hitherto unheard of angel is waiting, that a hitherto unseen face of God is emerging.

But here we must ask: who will bear the first, stupendous impact of the revelation? And how much of our Bible and how much of our religion will survive it?

As regards who will bear it, all I can say is what a Christian might say: once already, in the person of Jesus Transtorrentem, God himself has been our Actaeon, our Semele.

Hindus tell a story: once upon a time the earth was sorely afflicted by drought. There was wailing. Wailing for the corn that didn’t sprout, for the rice that didn’t strike root. Wailing by people too weak to perform the linga-sharira for their dead. Bhagiratha was a good and pious king. Leaving his dominions in charge of his chief minister, he walked out across the cracked earth. He built four fires in the four directions and sitting in the midst of them he practiced the most frightful austerities, hoping in this way to win the favour of one of the Great Gods. The sun that sucked all moisture out of lizards eggs sucked him dry, and at last, when his last delirium was crumbling, Brahma, the Great God, approached. Bhagiratha’s request was as boundless as the famine: would it please his Divine Majesty to let Ganga, the heavenly river, descend and flow across the burning earth. Brahma reminded the fierce but pious ascetic that the unimpeded descent upon it of such a wide and mighty river would shatter the earth. Maybe however there was a way. Maybe the god Shiva could be persuaded to emerge from his yogic introversion high in the Himalyas and take the impact of the descent upon his head and shoulders. Bhagiratha resumed his austerities. In the end he was little more than a mirage of mantras:

Shivo’ham

Bhairavo’ham

Sa’ham

Shivo’ham

Bhairavo’ham

Sa’ham

Shiva acceded. And so it was. And so it is. Continuously now, coming down to us from on high, we have here on Earth a heavenly river.

A Medicine River.

Though he stood between heaven and earth, mediating, not a hair of Shiva’s head was hurt. Jesus on the other hand was very badly damaged. And now again, in what looks like a collapsed Cumaean cave in Canyon Country, the angel is pointing to the Baptist who is looking towards Jesus.

And listening on behalf of a humanity that is hard of hearing, hard of spiritual hearing, maybe the angel can already hear a voice crying in that wilderness of geological sikharas that we see through the opening.

Could it be that there is a depth of nature that yearns with us, prays with us?

Could it be that we will come to the Kedron-Colorado?

Could it be that we will survive the impact?

Could it be that we are ready for Bright Angel?

Q. Your text bristles with exotic words., among them the mantra you have just quoted.What are you up to? Are you showing off?

A. It is likely that a person who seriously sets out to study genetics will be willing to encounter and acquire a new vocabulary. If they are lucky, young people who are undergoing puberty will also acquire new words. In their case the words they acquire will help them to name what is happening to them. Although our culture of yu wei works and days will neither acknowledge or accommodate them, there are puberties of spirit as well as puberties of body and mind. There is the Gethsemane experience and the Golgotha experience. There is an itinerarium transmentem in Deo. In Europe nowadays, persons caught up in such evolutions and egressions are unlikely to find a naming and enabling language immediately to hand. Like King Lear, they are out of doors. Mythically and verbally, they are out of doors. Little wonder if, in their destitution, they take shelter where they can. In igloo or tipi or hogan. In mosque or Amazonian myth. In the East Pagoda Hall of a Green Dragon Temple. In the neglected or rejected wisdom of their own culture. Nietzsche was acutely aware of such destitution among us:

Let us think of a culture that has no fixed and sacred site but is doomed to exhaust all possibilities and to nourish itself wretchedly on all other cultures – there we have the present age, the result of that Socratism which is bent on the destruction of myth. And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grubs for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities.

So, yes, there are exotic words in the text. But they aren’t there as a display of learning. They are there for the same reason that Indian meal was in Ireland during the famine. And it might be no harm to remember that during the sixteenth and later centuries not a few outlandish plants, among them the potato, were naturalized in Europe. This book does attempt to naturalize some of the mahavakyas and myths that Turtle brought back from the floor of the Abyss, that our Argonauts brought home from Outre Mere. It attempts to naturalize an exotic diagnosis of what ails us. It attempts to naturalize much that was once indigenous. The most exotic of the things it would naturalize is the Triduum Sacrum, is the Tenebrae harrow, and to do this it is glad of any helpful word that any Marco Polo will bring back from anywhere in the world. Spiritually, our condition brings Caliban to mind. Caliban is a landfish. And he is languageless. I am not unaware of how culturally amphibious the book is. I am sure that it does at times give the impression of `being a disorganized Musée de l’Homme. But could it be, as Nietzsche divined, that that is how we are. In our Waste Land, is that how we are? En Attendant Godot, is that how we are? And there is one further thing I’d like to say. Many of the words that I borrow are technical words. In the traditions from which they derive they have, many of them, a sacredly exact meaning. Also, they aren’t words that are likely to be widely used in popular speech or in the popular press and lexically therefore they are reliable, even durable. They help to stabilize a text and to protect it from misinterpretation. And as for the myths that I’ve imported, I think of them as Magna Cartas, inspiring, permitting and fostering a new way of being in the world, enabling us, for instance, to welcome the Lord of Life who, on a hot Sicilian day, comes to drink at our well. This surely is necessary among a people in whose cultural assumptions and axioms lie the seeds of ecological havoc. It wouldn’t I think be altogether irresponsible to suggest that European culture must now run the risk of loosing its moorings to the ancient Mediterranean – to Hebrew prophecy, Greek philosophy and Roman law – to these in so far as we have thought of them as the normative perspective within which we have for so long attempted to organize ourselves and our world. I’m not talking about an exodus away from our past. I’m talking about not being deaf to the crakynge and cryynge of Pentecostal thunder. I’m talking about a journey to Medicine River. I’m talking about a Pleistocene thunder dreamer praying on a peak in Paha Sapa. I’m talking about Black Elk’s restorative stroke redeeming the earth from the effect upon it of Balin’s dolorous stroke. I’m talking about a healing backwards and well as forwards from the Triduum Sacrum. I’m talking about a healing that has happened at the origins of Western consciousness. It isn’t always in indigenous ritual, myth and metaphor that we will inherit that healing. It isn’t always passively that we will inherit it. Some there are who, like Jacob, will walk away lamed from the wrestling. Old indocrinations, particularly when they have become habits of eye and mind, tend to have a lot of pride in them, and fight in them, and never more so than when their hegemony in us is threatened. To know this, even more devastatingly than he did awake, Job had only to seek comfort in sleep. So no. We shouldn’t let words like Gethsemane and Golgotha fall into disuse. Not yet. Not at this stage of our evolution. Rather should we try to naturalize them in ritual, myth and metaphor, whatever their provenance. Hagia Sophia and Chartres Cathedral and all the rituals enacted within them notwithstanding, European Christianity hasn’t yet housed the Triduum Sacrum. Maybe there is no religion that can. And yet how wonderful an attempt Tenebrae is. Religiously in Tenebrae, we overcome the linguistic and ethnic diversification of Babel. So how, in that context, could the sacred words of other peoples sound like jargon? On the contrary, they are marvels of our mother tongue.

Q. You have just mentioned Black Elk. Him and his vision you have also attempted to naturalize. But can it be done? Industrialized as we are, can we culturally integrate the healing ministrations, however heavenly, of a Pleistocene thunder dreamer?

A. Walking into Altamira or Lascaux we see that Europe was once a vast Serengeti. How geographically vast it was we do not know but the impression we come away with is that it teemed with wild animals. Stroke by stroke we wiped them out. That accumulation of strokes was a dolorous stroke. As dolorous in every way as the dolorous stroke we see in the pit in Lascaux. We built Europa’s Europe above that pit, above that stroke. All over again, it is Minoan Crete built above a labyrinth. A labyrinth in which is impounded that in ourselves which we cannot accept or be hospitable to. What I’m saying is, I’m not at all sure that Europa’s Europe is a good idea. Also, but not without trepidation, I believe it has run its course. The book is hospitable to Black Elk and his vision because with him, he being a Pleistocene medicine man, we can go down into our labyrinth and with his restorative stroke heal our dolorous stroke. Where Theseus merely intensified our trouble, making it more malignant, Black Elk resolves it and, in so doing, our sick or poisoned Dordogne becomes our Pleistocene Tongue River, and this is stretching it, but I will stretch it, in so doing he has mystically revived and recalled our lost Serengeti. And now again, as if our ghost dance had succeeded, the herds are back. Now again we can live in the Great Memory with them. Now again, walking into our dreams, Rhinoceros and Birdman and Bull will leave their medicine bundles. Now again, the good will of all things coming with us, we can come forward into culture. And so, empowered as he was by the heavens, we can of course be healed by the healing ministrations of a Pleistocene thunder dreamer. If an individual is healed by them, if, returning to the primal world, some Job or other is healed by them, then in a sense the group is healed by them. Then psychically, if not yet culturally, the group has integrated them. Then, whether we know it yet or not, Tsetsekia has replaced the labyrinth. And, in a way that we previously didn’t have, we have a chance. And, come to think of it, a Tsetsekia of sorts has already been enacted: in four great engravings by Picasso, a little girl with flowers in her arm, or with a dove in her arm, is leading the blind Minotaur among us. Where else but to Pasiphae’s calving ground is she leading him? Where else but there have we most need of the hospitalities of Kwakiutl firelight?

Q. Who is she, the little girl? Is she a Virgil who guides us through our Underworld? Or is she a Beatrice who leads us to Paradise?

A. I call her Marie Therese, but only because Picasso gave her the profile of a woman of that name, a woman he loved.

More important than who she is is what she does. By leading the Minotaur back into our world, she, the child, reintroduces the theranthropic among us, not just as a category, but as a phenomenon, of consciousness and culture.

A way it is of making other Guernicas a little less inevitable.

How terrible to think that she might herself be another Kore, that she might herself be another Femme Torero, outcrops of buttock, breast and head in a destructive tangle of bull, woman and horse.

And yet there she is, a child with flowers in her arm or with a dove in her arm and in this, Picasso’s image of her, she has in some sense harrowed our hell.

The classical world, the modern world, civilization of no matter what kind or where, is safer for what she is doing.

And yes, she has Pasiphae’s calving ground in mind, and there she will go leading the blind Bullman.

But don’t be surprised if, their purpose there accomplished, they again take to the roads one morning.

Another Antigone she, she will walk with him all the way to Colonus. And if Colonus cannot cope with them, they will sit and wait for Christianity.

Their coming is crisis not just for Classical but for Christian culture.

Even when the Grove of the Erinyes has become the Garden of Olives, there will still be a question: is the Christianity that is able for the Minotaur able for Marie Therese?

The next time she comes among us it might be the script and score of a new and purely mystical Tenebrae she will be carrying in her arm. She will in other words be challenging us to cross into Evangelanta.

Q. Tsetsekia over ground might well replace the labyrinth under ground ,but what of the Whaleman’s Chapel? What of whatever in Christianity is charter myth to it? What theses, if any, might a Christian Antigone nail to its door?

A. Robert Lowell has prayed at that door:

Hide

Our steel, Jonas Messias, in thy side.

Going beyond what Lowell intended, we can think of that steel as the lance with which we have pierced every Presence of God that came to help us, among them Bison Bull, Albatross, Lamb and Whale.

Q. Would you nail your own book to that door?

A. In the last century the skin of a spermwhales penis was chasuble and cassock to us in our Whaleman’s nave.

In this century, we have softened the light of our spermacetti candle with a Nazi lampshade.

And, for centuries now, so total and so deadly has been our assault on the natural world that it wouldn’t be at all fantastic to claim that we must have been drinking Ahab’s grog from the upturned irons of our harpoons.

We need something altogether more deeply redemptive than yet another Christian Reformation, than yet another French or Russian Revolution. We need to undergo the Great Evolutionary Egressus:

Et egressus est Jesus cum discipulis suis

trans torrentem Cedron

And now I am in trouble. Can I tell you why?

In naming it, I have given verbal existence to the Great Transgression. As we talked about the lance with which we have pierced every Presence of God in the world – it occurred to me, as we talked, to say that the upturned iron of that lance was the chalice in Ahab’s eucharist, but I pulled back, fearing the many and terrible consequences of giving something so awful a name. A sense I have is that we have transgressed greatly and the ceremony on board the Pequod is the image of an energy at work in our world. And I thought that by naming it we might see it, and seeing it, pray:

Save us, God, from the great transgression.