Anima-consciousness favors a protective mimicry, an attachment, to something or someone else to which it is echo. Here we see the wood-nymphs that belong to trees, the souls which hover over waters, speak from dells or caves, or sing from sea-rocks and whirlpools — and, most, vividly, the succubus.
-- James Hillman, Anima: Anatomy of A Personified Archetype
***
The statue of Eleuthereus ((Dionysos)) was carried back and forth on a ship equipped with wheels ... The ship places the arrival of the strange procession in the perspective of the sea, which is no more than a day's journey for an animal-drawn vehicle from any point on the Greek island. The wheels show that the journey to Athens was made over land, but the ship took on a ritual significance which the vase painters easily raised to the level of myth.
-- Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life
***
When Pryderi returned ((to Dyfed)) he and Manawydan feasted and took their ease. They began the feast at Arberth, since that was the chief court where every celebration began, and after the evening's first sitting, while the servants were eating, the four companions arose and went to Gorsedd Arberth ((a fairy mound)), taking company with them. As they were sitting on the mound they heard thunder, and with the loudness of the thunder a mist fell, so that no one could see his companions. When the mist lifted it was bright everywhere, and when they looked out at where they had once seen their flocks and herds and dwellings they now saw nothing, no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling -- only the houses of the court empty, deserted, uninhabited, without man or beast in them; their own company was lost too, and they understood that only the four of them alone remained.
-- "Manawydan son of Llyr," from The Mabinogion, transl. Jeffrey Gantz
***
METAPHOR: A HYMN
You are the ache in my words
for salt symmetry, for those
rudders & wheels
of the god in his
ship-car who freights us,
island by day by poem,
from outermost to home.
Always your blue mordents
inside these daily tides
which is so like something else,
of no day I have seen
nor of any night I've dreamed.
For every purchase
I make here on one
named shore, you
at once sight its
haunting beyond, the
image as real as life itself
and is. Though you and
I will never kiss, our
puckerings are all:
the boom of a
remembered wave's
collapse is like sky
horses at full thunder,
and both are hooves
of that wild heave
of me inside the woman
who is so much like
you. And in that swoosh
erasing all, you ferry
the god in his device
the distance of two souls,
arriving at that
shore where
we are one broken
wave of salt and
foamed surrender.
My wife's sleeping
shape upstairs is like
that mound in Wales
where to spend one
night invokes a mist
dissolving one life
into some strangely
shining other,
the old commotions
simply gone.
Beneath those sheets
are nymphs and
naiads, Ariadne
in her gloom
and Iris on
her pool, the
Lady of my wells
descending far
and still farther
in a gossamer
of fading smile.
In a mole's breeze-
ruffled white fur
where it lay dead
yesterday on the
road next
to huge Lake
Dora (savagely
brilliant and blue)
is every
soft cheek I've
ever glanced, every
pale breast
that swung
up to my lips.
What would this be
without your
other's stain and echo
which no words of mine
will ever quite name,
much less bed?
Like an unseen
shore's faint-foaming
rumble, my every verse
peramble stumbles
everywhere in search
of you, unaware it
is your own soft singing
in tree and wave,
in sleeping wife
and road-killed mole.
Wrap all my ends
in your fish tales.
Be the keel too
heavy with the one
that got away,
the god who comes
inside your ebbings,
the thirst you
slake in every breast
I squeeze and suck
with these othering
fingertips.
- Oct. 18, 2004
