Part 3: LOVE SONG
Songs of Benediction
red heat
24. SONG TO MEN
(a lyric love poem)
Men, your canyons are the red gorges where our women’s night mists settle, and lift with morning, as your radiant rock returns its heat to the day.
Your waking peak teaches Singular focus to our sight, your mesa plateau is the unveiling vista which gives Distance, on which to work the power and Breadth of our women’s Vision.
We can fall back in mist-eddies to contemplate your silent tower : the rock geometry you forge in space. And we can sing high winds down your valleys, make your tunnels howl their trumpet music, boom kettle-drum rockfalls down your cliffs, whip the strung music from your bending trees.
Sing up your silence.
Man whose rock-form is born of Earth-Woman.
Woman whose wind-voice vibrates through the instruments of Men.
Our calling birds who rock and ride the spiral currents above your red heat.
*
We can drift up your canyons, we rising morning clouds; ascend and vapourise into atmosphere, disappear from your sight : to hear the keening of the high jetstream above. Like the scream of a high curlew.
Condense in night-cool descent into deep valleys.
*
Your distant latticed cities catch early sunrays, gleam then spangle with the sunrising-sky :
your igneous towers, their rearing passions of singularity.
*
Men of forests of the valleys : Men who are the trees, the knotted shaped and hollowed trunks where parent-birds and possums burrow with their young : within whose rearing concentric walls they sleep to the booming heart-beat of the earth.
Men of the forests : the Foresters of the Earth.
You whose love and learning is the Trees : the Forest-Fount of water-vapour which sprays our women’s rainbow-arcs across the sky, the Leaf-Source of sacred oxygen which fires our cells and our living beings.
Dark-tendoned Men moving amongst dark stringy-bark, or resting in broad black shadow-patch of veldt msasa trees.
Red-gold Men the colour and muscle of their own teak, or quivering brown-invisible within the tremors of their high aspen.
Pale Men like their cool far-north birch trees, lean freckled trunks ; or sheltering gaunt amidst the spectral ghost-gums of their borrowed lands, the beneficent speckled shadow which is their sheer survival in sunheat.
Men of corded tree-bodies, rooted in earth and water, branched with spans and spires and tree-snake coils, clothed in green spikes or brown cascades ;
Men like charged purple bougainvillea, or pitch-dark pine, or pale camellia, or grey whispering casuarina ;
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your hushing tree-top roar and creak-speaking,
and leaf-dropping silence :
robin hood brotherhood of forest and foresters.
Have you heard the wind-song in your own silence? Felt the wind-breath which hums the trailing leaves, shakes bushy hills to husky voice, strokes into force the whistling dust-devils, the roar of thunderstorms even.
The Songs of Her Motion : of leaves and twigs and branches whipping up in wind, a slim crescendo winding and snaking between clouds.
The voice which Sings, falls into your deep Silence.
The piano-lilting of water as it rolls over river-rocks : these formal instruments imposed into stream-flow, insistent in their love of turbulent music.
The tropospheric storms drawing up fanfare from the icebound stillness of an antarctic peak
Singing up the land :
the Songs of Crag Man and Wind Woman.
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Have you scanned the horizon with your focussed vision? ~ Roved your searchlight-beam to uncover a mountain, a seabed, a contrary drought or flood, or define and understand the struck death of a remote lightning’d tree.
Her broad horizon which unfolds, and delivers up a mountain range to your arrow-straight view.
The vista of the Earth : the Round horizon of Everything-there-is, offering now to his Grown wide-angle gaze, the march of her far-and-near escarpments, the breadth and depth of the oceans, the real fevers and weeping which drive her drought and flood.
The searching, critical Vision of Grown Man-woman :
the expanse both Outspread and Focussed, of Earth and weathered Sky.
Have you seen your sinewave mind ?
~ and seen our mind ?
~ as we have seen yours ?
Your Man-Mind : its soaring geometry of aerial pylons, like the steel pinions and arches of a great bridge : through which we can swirl and eddy in its depths, and dip and dart and weave within its high spans above, on flashing wings.
Its Tree-Form architecture, huge arborising reaches : in which all manner of small and quick things take their rest, and play, and hide, and seek : this fortified kingdom where those of lighter and aerial being can live out their love of motion : sing out their song beyond reach, within its fastness.
See your Mind-form at night : its darkened towers, its severe mesh of tensioned wires : in sharp relief against her confetti light-show within its black-line lattice, her crackers going off in a wind-storm of sparks – which capture on the elegant strung cables, make glittering ornamental skeins with their settling gleams.
(The fireworks-Sparks : the incandescent moments-of-future which we have seen, we Women : just before you have. Flung them high above us as we go, to light our way further, See into the beyond : offer the Sparks to blow and settle on your magnificent spans, that you may at last see your own Form winking in darkness, and use your engineered and beautiful order to comprehend their bright meaning. To take Action, to be inspired by this feminine Offering : this glinting Scintilla-sight.)
(Deja-vu : Yes, we have seen it :
just before you have.)
*
And now look upon us as we have been, as children, we Boys and Girls : See us now, in our sandpit. We Girls are down one end together, laughing, holding high our little handfuls of dry sand to run out through our fingers : squealing at the flashes of mica as they spray and fall in sunshine. Then mixing it into mud-pies with our coloured water-buckets, stirring it smiling into random pretty swirls.
As the little Boys laugh and growl their engine noises down at the far end, rushing around their mechanical toys, piling up sand mountains and collapsing tunnels, grading lumpy furrows that go nowhere, or sometimes into each other.
How we are without each other :
as delighted pretty children, playing with our elusive discoveries :
unable to work out their real purpose.
One time in a waking dream, I went to explore a Man’s mind : as though given permission : went as a little, floating, hazy, untidy cloud, which might not get in the way too much : an exploring skein of chiffon-curiosity (my necessary, womanly Curiosity, that draws so much into our sight).
Rising first into my sight : an incredible planar cityscape of 3-D circuitry, uncountable points in rectilinear connection. Coming closer, resolving into geometric avenues, soaring orthogonal spires, a discreetly glittering citadel. (I must smile, in sympathy for our shared history : who else but a Man could have a mind which converges upon a Citadel ?)
How utterly fantastic it is now, filling my inner sight : tentative entry into a great ante-chamber : discerning with shy difficulty some lofty architraves, beams, struts ~ dark hardwood, steel, tensioned wires, sprung fibreglass arches ~ somewhat forbidding. (I must dare to laugh at myself a little, nearer to them now : know I am starting to expect gargoyles, even.)
And now it is emerging ~ still hard to capture ~ a fantastic dynamic complex, a boundless three-dimensional network whose intricacy is manifest rather than comprehensible : whose aesthetic is somehow geometric, rectilinear, an extraordinary precision-modus of conception and presentation. Whose form is defined by inconceivably fine, fast motion, rather than by visible structures : straight and right-angled electronic pathways, converging intermittently into glowing, heated power centres : which translate this electron input into an output of high-speed spinning motion, indefinable flying axles and flywheels.
(net images)
And now it is emerging ~ still hard to capture ~ a fantastic dynamic complex, a boundless three-dimensional network whose intricacy is manifest rather than comprehensible: whose aesthetic is somehow geometric, rectilinear, an extraordinary precision-modus of conception and presentation. Whose form is defined by inconceivably fine, fast motion, rather than by visible
structures: straight and right-angled electronic pathways, converging intermittently into glowing, heated power centres: which translate this electron input into an output of high-speed spinning motion, indefinable flying axles and flywheels.
(Like a marvellous cut-away of a jet engine at full revolutions : its beautiful axial mathematic of stationary and rotating vanes, the perfected fans, twenty thousand screaming rpm : which drive wild air into fierce spiral order and compression with hydrocarbon, explode them into a tight cone of inferno thrust.
This rigorous, elegant Man’s translation of the forms
of power, of speed, of penetration.)
How intense my difficulty, my concentration, to comprehend this virtual-reality inward mind-design, its indescribable workings.
How I call out : Give me a Thought, Show me a Mental Event : Conceive of Me.
And then I can apprehend electrons, as though tiny sparks, spiralling inwards to surround me : approaching closer, even faintly touching my shape now, their pin-pricks of immaterial negative-charge, of where they might-have-been :
embracing my aerial form in a hugging net of speed.
My electronic definition.
And now I can apprehend electrons, as though tiny sparks, spiralling inwards to surround: approaching closer, even faintly touching now, their pin-pricks of immaterial negative-charge, of where they might-have-been:
And at that time it was right, too, to offer up my own Mind, my Woman’s mind, for exploration by Male consciousness.
As he did : he took my permission, and passed within, his outstretched body in forward motion : like superman flies.
Into my enveloping cloud : like a pilot flying blind. Seeing, momentarily, the vapours part to display a rainbow-touched towering cumulus. And then his outstretched limbs and body are starting to gather cloud-strands as they move, cobwebby, adherent; capturing in layers and trails until he is nearly enveloped.
I am becoming entrapped, he calls : I am near-immobilised.
(And I can communicate back, to this Man-consciousness of my Mind : Do not fear. This is the way our organic life-systems deal with foreign-bodies : they are gently enfolded in tissue-cocoons, sealed smooth and harmless, sequestered out of the way. Stay in your safe module, and look out around you.)
And he can see : an emerging fine-stranded net of multiple-linked neurons ~ axons streaming out into their long avenues and sinuous disappearing goat-paths, suspended in a vast sea-sponge network of strands connecting, diverging, bypassing, overflying : in a floating free-form lacework as though spun without gravity. Their wandering, dedicated silken pathways converge intermittently into clusters, like spiders’ nests : the power centres, decision centres, the ganglia and foci of Thought.
The drifting spiderweb strands are beaded with the illuminated droplets of axon-dendrite synapses, which gather and concentrate at these thought-junctions as delicate glow-worm grottos, like winking city-lights, laid out with night-light highways, streets and downtown towers.
(net image)
There are some special complexes : the thalamic nuclei, and the binary cities of hypothalamus and pituitary, and the single esoteric pineal light-point : the spaceport-centres where stories are called in and out by the hormones, the carrier-molecules who live between two worlds, who translate thought and enthralment and love into the very movements and electro-chemistry of our distant bodies ; and return again with messages of bodily appeal for hormonal instruction, stimulus, retreat, modulation, balance :
~ the circular conceptual-electro-neuro-biochemical pathways who bring in tales of joy or catastrophe from the physical entity beyond, and carry back their soothing and instant neuro-hormonal remedies :
the attentive, listening, cyclic communion of Mind-Body.
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And he can now apprehend, rather than see, the innumerable mind-echelons and interconnections and exchange centres, and control-towns and cities and their satellite villages :
~ which all eventually Converge in their understood tasks,
to Serve an over-riding, Presiding, evanescent Ethic :
~ which we may, reasonably, try to conceive of as
a supreme illuminated spire,
or star-ceiling’d dome,
or charged and sparkling atmosphere :
~ but which in truth eludes conceptual definition :
beyond the simple, presiding Beauty of Her Ethic.
Dear God : Your male Citadel unveiled :
the firmament cathedral,
gorgeous electron-wonderland :
Sacred Temple to shimmering Goddess-Ethic.
The Blessed Mind of Godde :
Man-Woman-Spirit
Woman-Man-One.
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This Mind of Man, and Mind of Woman.
Who can commingle effortlessly, with graceful and subtle twining, within the single Mind of every Woman and every Man.
Who can be Seen, if we so choose, Each by the Other : in Self-Contemplation.
And yet each of whom can remain completely Invisible,
excised, lobotomised :
by those who choose to see,
and to huddle alone within,
Only One.
