To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Janaka Stucky: From "Ascend Ascend," a work in progress, with a note by the author


[Excerpted from Janaka Stucky’s forthcoming book, Ascend Ascend (Third Man Books, April 2019). The accompanying portrait of the author is by photographer Adrianne Mathiowetz.]

Blessed is the lotus
The day’s bleeding wound

Blessed are the spiders their alphabet
Twenty six stones my corpse is dancing

Blessed are the worms the maggots
Sexless and probing like tongues

Through the rotting soil

Blessed is the loam

Blessed is the loam the darkness
Mushrooms blooming teeth pushing

Through the earth’s black and putrid gums

Blessed is the Maw
The Great Maw the mouth the gnashing
Of continental shores

Blessed are the stones the rocks
The island all the world a promontory scab
Hardening around the earth’s myriad
Molten wounds

Blessed is the blood the bile ascending
The gross moss of shapeless years forming

On the eyeless trunks of trees

Blessed are the snakes the dragons
Breathing the giants eating each dumb
Beast our mothers our fathers filled with blood

Blessed are the black cricket’s legs singing
Furiously until the whole lake is on fire

Blessed is the fire
Blessed is the lake
Blessed are the cricket’s black legs

Blessed is the trembling nerve of now
The great topaz hurtling through
Galactic dark

Blessed is the dark the knotted roots
Of the first tree the fearful serpent
Uncoiling still as even the first
Stone turns to dust

Blessed is our fear
The Great Retching which rips us
Wide eyed hairy and blood spattered
Terribly laughing up from the mud

Blessed is the transfiguration of terror that wakens
The crimson thread within

Blessed is our weaving and braiding
Our crawling

Blessed is our climb

Blessed are we who flop from mud
To soil to grass to trees

Blessed are our lungs our hands

Blessed is the transmutation of air
And fruit and meat to spirit

Blessed are the bees
Blessed is their hive returning

Through each flaw of rain revealing
The heirophany of nectar
In the fresh light of the cloud’s empty womb

Blessed is our moaning and shitting
Our walking on quivering feet

Blessed is our walking and running
Our speaking each day our dying

Our struggle toward freedom our dying
Blessed is the fight for freedom
Even more than to be free

Blessed is our life
Blessed is our instrument responding
With purity to the collapsing
Sigh of the world

Blessed is our cry
Our cry our radiant repeating

The gleaming cinder

Like honey like wax like roses
The world vanishing and nothing
But us remaining beneath the abyss
Of god singing

I am the one that is not

And when the cry comes to no longer
Be the vessel the cry comes
Not from your mouth
Alone it is not you talking

It is ancestors of ancestors speaking with centuries
Upon centuries of mouths it is
Not you alone desiring it is

A galaxy of descendants desiring
Down the long fathomless
Pillar of your infinite heart

For between the void and the abyss
You alone struggle and are imperiled

And in your small earthen chest
One thing alone struggles and is imperiled

And when the cry comes
The cry comes in the cryptic tongue

To pass beyond my body bastion
Of sugar and bone

My body
Monstrously shining above
Black lichen rivers

Its curse like a star of blood erupting
From my throat

A promise roaring
Jackals howling
Awful and grim

My body my body
Lust magnificent
Views of Byzantium
Crucified awake in me
In me among

My body idle and brutal
Let light thunder
The first to adore

My body my ghost
My retinue of ghouls

Profane and dancing
Dizzy drunk and shrieking
Through a phantasmagoria of stars

My body exquisite
Thighs streaming with blood

My body hungry and gaping
Threaded with hands

My body my tongue distended
And dangling amid corpses
And noncorpses
Gun-gun drone the bees

My body my mouth
My penetrated mouth singing
Through the honeycomb locked in its jaws

My penetrated body
Levitating weightless
Rotted by this leprous alien song

I am penetrated
I am penetrated
I am pierced

My body my elephant my chariot
I am pierced

I am penetrated by men

I am penetrated by insects plants and beasts
The ecstatic march of flesh

I am penetrated by birds by stones
And the wind’s twisted shell

I am penetrated by seas and fires
By colors by wings
By horns by claws

By constellations
Butterlfies

I am penetrated
By great hemlocks blackening
The moonless sky
I am penetrated

By water by dreams
By lightning cracks in mute night

By night by night thick as death
It must be death

I am penetrated by death and cannot see

And beneath the night sky the universe
Of every eye judging acutely
With their small fires

Igniting to the orchard within
Me the path of names

Every word along the way
Lit like a flame upon
The wick of its origin

I kiss each name and make
For it a temple on my tongue I name

A stone I name an insect I name
An idea dancing across
A dust mote’s horizonless stage

I name a nightmare
Ecstasy

I name sleep
A fertile wall of storms

I name the air choked
With a blizzard of blossoms
White origin of apples
Buzzing on the wild threadless sun

I name the eye of the earth blinking in my blood
A phenomena of swarms

I name the hour black lightning
And its children golden sheaves of fire

Burning Lanka to the ground

I name this fever a flood like
A harras of feral horses breaking
On the blackened plain

And the trembling shale of stardust is its name
Red java flower is its name

The sky lit by heaping nectar
Is its name

The cloud whose throne is a corpse
Is its name

Dwell in its presence in dread
Is its name

Reflect on the root from which you were hewn
Is its name

An act without knowledge is nothing
Is its name

The seven heavens of chaos
Is its name

Vilon is its name
Raki’a is its name
Shehakim is its name
Zevul is its name
Ma’on is its name
Makhun is its name
Aravot is its name

A book like the hum of a severed head
Is its name

The firmament scattered like a riddle
Is its name

The millstone grinding bright miracle of wheat
Is its name

A silver bridge of the dead returning to their infinite numinous source
Is its name

A choir of thousands terrifying slow and rising
From a single mouth is its name

Scorched by the awestruck jism of a new element
Is its name

Amen amen nezah selah is its name

There is a precise instant when the world
Is marvelous

Now
Is its name
I hear its cry

I hear its cry
Lacerated by a paradise of sadness

Devoured by brutes

I hear its cry
Ashen with the incandescent
Dust of rubies

I hear its cry I rise
Weeping

A moth emerging
From the innocence of limbo
Beneath the green bowers

I hear its cry
Dissolving in a golden beam

I invent new beasts
New flowers new stars
New men new holes
Pool of Bethesda
New flesh new tongues
New purity O purity
This vision of purity
Erect for the brief bliss of the void

With their pestilential breath abating
I leave the hazel copse

I depart through nameless
Numberless years

Climb the cosmic mountain
Parapets of jasper shining
Above the waning cypress
Wading through thickets of mallow
I approach the navel of the earth

From the trunk of a gum tree
I fashion the sacred pole

Anoint it and climb
Belligerently ascend
And climb
Further still
I climb
And disappear
Into the sky

[author’s note.  Ascend Ascend was written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals, while secluded in the tower of a 100-year-old church. It is rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of merkabah literature, documenting an ascent up the kabbalistic sefirot to witness the chariot of god. My own attempt at this was initially unplanned and spontaneous; the first experience without agenda or tied to any tradition. What I saw could have been a UFO, a palace of Mayan gods, or Terence McKenna's "machine elves" just as easily as it could have been Ezekiel's vision. However, after talking with some fellow practitioners I felt that my experience—and any future attempt to document it—resonated most in the kabbalistic tradition. So I secluded myself and went into retreat. ... While the majority of canonical merkabah literature is fairly dry and legal—composed of prose focused primarily on preparations for the journey while finally demurring to describe the experience itself—Ascend Ascend uses poetry to touch the ineffable. This larger work is therefore a kind of poetics of ascent, a long poem documenting the ecstatic destruction of the self through its union with the divine.]

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