Grokus Explains His Gargoyle Nature Poem by Warren Falcon

That place among the rocks - Is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have. - Theodore Roethke

for Raven Travailus considering ending it all

Just woke up midday
both yer missives slipped
beneath my door early
a.m. barefeet discover
stumbling from what is
already too bright

urban clamour

grinding pigeons

what few doves
remain are steeple
bound but more on
that further down.

Glad you made it through
the dark dark night, yours.

Your

death or dying notes
not with standing
arrive smooth, un-
folded (as is the
word here folded) ,
unwrinkled, smudge-
less, pristine,

their image plain.

Quotidien.

As is the
voice, flat.

Yours.

The clear scrawl.
The direct delivery
of what is without

blame

and yet, and yet

a cliff hanger -

will our hero

come through

the abject place

survive himself,


himself the

extended night

clutched too

much into the day.

.


The Hanged Man card of Tarot comes into vision with the phrase cliff hanger...and the Fool Card. The Hanged Man's suspended upside down in limbo...he's in transition, but just on the other side of mid-journey, a slight smile of resignation on his face. The Fool Card, of course, the first major arcana, young Fool who is about to take a leap of faith off the cliff into the valley below. In some card decks he is blindfolded...thus blind faith, what I call " animal faith" in what may come next with a conscious action or waiting on the edge for a moment when life or grace or other intervenes...Martin Buber calls it " the narrow ridge":


I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge, " writes Buber,
"I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed."

...The narrow ridge is the place where I and Thou meet, he [Buber] added. When I asked him to clarify this symbolism to me, he replied...'If you like, you can think of the narrow ridge as a region within yourself where you cannot be touched. Because there you have found yourself: and so you are not vulnerable." (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul,1947] p.184) .


For you, perhaps the untouchable region of self remains still " undisclosed" or perhaps you have like most of us only glimpses of that enclosure, the self-cloister, the oasis which is the
centerpoint of self and Self and Universe always/already present, or at least that is the massive presumption of mystics, but it, Universe, self/Self remains most often elusive due to the stormy intervention of the senses and the vicissitudes of life presentations, and YOU have had more than your share of such...thus your need, your insistent enclosure into instuments, objects, images, to sound and pound and lu lu lu lull yourself into that enclosed space which is all space without dimension upon and within which you receive in your open-at-last-ness, in perhaps the rare place and ocassion when your arms uncross from your chest, and you can finally receive what for many or enough are blessings...your being in that vulnerable yet trusting place allows what is there in the narrow ridge place to meet what will be undisclosed where you too may undisclose yourself within that place and are then met by That That Is, Suchness, Thusness, Is-ness, Tathata which is variously translated as " thusness" or " suchness"... representing the base reality and can be used to terminate the use of words...but amplifies image, vision, which can lead to no image, no vision, but immense yet really real Silence and Extended Field and yet also "the Stillpoint of the turning world" (T.S. Eliot) .

.

Theodore Roethke, once wrote of " the journey from I to Otherwise" and then the return to I with Otherwise, both at once and as one, or in stormy but welcome relation:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

.

You dwell on the narrow ridge as does everyone only most folks are able to ignore and repress that liminal space because dwelling on that ridge is to be nowhere...what Thomas Merton, quoting Chuang Tzu, calls " the Palace of Nowhere"...

Call it what you will, I think Hell is a better description for a lot of that Hanged Man place though there is hope in the image of the card, the little smile on the face of the upside down man...who has given up the battle and waits in between " the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den" - " the edge is what I have"....self as edge, edge as self...Merton called himself and his fellow monks/mystics " marginal men"....I have called myself that too but now it is " gargoyle" that is the most descriptive name or designation....ledge/edge dweller, not IN the church or Cathedral, forever outside such, but close, on the edge where " once was mystery revealed" in earlier times...always a watcher, an edge/ledge sitter peering out and down into/onto/upon the pedestrian world, the rolling pastoral scene beyond, never able to see the Duomo, the crown of Mystery's edifice, but it is very close behind, that Rotunda which images the Cosmos....gargoyle with Cosmos at his/her back tracks life, the temporal, from above with Mystery's weight distorting his/her visage forever forcing vision forward out and down...a dark most often ugly jewel but a jewel nonetheless in the Cosmic Crown...Gargoyle twists and blurrs and stirs new perception, surgically accurate visions of what most folks sense or feel but never really see or express but for flails, wails, gasps and clasping at promised baubles of church and culture/country. Bumpkins boobing head or cock-long into each other and what is near for fear of missing what they always/already are missing, the Tathata offered but without advertisement (despite Enlightenment by Ticketron and Bestseller/Talk TV trivialized versions of the once was sacred but now sanitized, adulterated, microwaved in seconds " spirituality"...sorry, Gargoyle in me needed a parenthesis to rant) .

Suffice it to say, to neigh, even bray:

We serve.

Awful vocation. Odious purpose. Mournful ministry. But we serve.

I reserve the right to complain as a human because it hurts, is hell, is no place anyone or being should dwell but dwell there we all do only most refuse the journey, are pleased enough or would rather just live the animal out and into the grave or dust having thrust and shoved and, yes, loved best-as-could-can and then dies into the liminal-being-animal at the end, schluffing the body and all that, for me endlessly schluffing skin cell by skin cell, behind, blind beneath the ridge at last, repast for worms, scattered by storms. At last unseen.

We serve. YOU serve. And perhaps can emerge, one toe in life waters, again. But the legal pad is a cosmos too. A relation. A gesture of placement, and a just right to complain as a solitary finite creature.

We should convene a convention for gargoyles who, it is not even imagined by those below, know of Mystery, Cosmos close at our back, oh silly vocation, a vent and spleen and rave and lean into our undisclosed humanity at last or at least with fellow Otherwise bounders:

Odd collections mound in the attic
where I retire to cloister and wait.

Leaden pilgrimage up and down pointless
stairs accumulate distance.

My beard becomes a convention of lepers and bells.


Fingernail parings

clumps of hair

bits of flesh

sacks of ears


all are relics in the making.


I become an accountant listing and numbering each holy scrap.

I try not to be critical but my eyes lie.

I cannot confess except by pencil,
leaving notes and grease stains
for the priest to interpret.

Absolution my hope,
a mute vow is my prosthesis.

Then Spring returns.

My boat has sunk. All mended nets,
a year's work, are lost.

Nothing to do.

I return to You, a parenthesis in the sea of loneliness.

Each star, each breast, You have removed
in my absence, mourning made permanent,
scars upon your throat oddly fish-shaped.

Astonished, my voice returns, curses then caresses,
withered left hand free to unravel regret nerve for
nerve, the only net worth mending.

I reserve this one strange act from a year of orthodoxy,

to anoint Your feet with tears.

I dry them with my hair, Your outstretched arms
a beseeching beyond emptiness, Your chest barren
but for my hands remembering the uses of prayer,
kisses but murmurs, rumored stars where swollen sails had been.

.

Are gargoyles free to abandon, to forsake their vocations, to somehow, perhaps lightning struck on the temple tower, to transform, to morph into human shape though still distorted and ugly, or perhaps, if grace be grace, be indeed fair of face and voice then descend to the human world, step upon the concourse, and track the human pace of embodied, ensouled, emotional subjectively shared human life? Now there's a book I'd like to read, a play, a musical, a movie I'd like to witness - when the gargoyle lays his edge burden down and has to discover the smell of the human and other herd below, grief and grovel, love and betrothal, the brothel, the bother of beauty, the awful hell of it within but out of reach for most, but ghosting in human form but this time only with motion and emotion and transcending notions gathered at oceans edge of grief and longing, the need to belong after all but it is all so appalling but one learns to appreciate the edge had, the ledge-upon-dwelled, the dormition of steeples receding into urban distances, said steeples the hairline of god, holds where fellow gargoyles perch, lurk, search 180 degrees chattering each to each, one at every direction north, south, east, west, reporting what is seen from their watch in the lurch below....the bell towers bong and so gargoyles know sound and distance from the din just behind or beneath, context is everything, everything is everywhere, all is the narrow ridge even the alleys, the byways below, the worn path of the woods, on the hill, in the valley, trailing disclosures avoided or come at last and so come to know ourselves at last for a moment as we are,

beasts upon the" purchased hill,
serpents of the human din,
Which I is I? A fallen man....
displaced, one is One,

free in the tearing wind.

.

Will call to see if dinner for two, gargoyle fare but no more pigeons! , is fine.

Your fellow upon the stone ledge, ancient piles throbbing,
thus I know, despite concretion, I am a living being,


Grokus Disclosus King Unflung But Sung and Singing