COLOR & EGGS : The New Math

Justice Clarence Thomas speaking during the Catholic mass
in celebration of last rites for the late Justice, Anthony Scalia,
reads from Scripture Romans 5:5-11

IF WE STOP USING JESUS WORDS ARE EGGS
       Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person  -Romans 5:7

no way a seed
a word, alone, an egg

semen on the blue dress
semen on the altar cloth

         ****

this last
rite

my god, my god

have you forsaken

supreme justice dead
photographed in black, the seed

this last
right

of white mythology, won’t
stop using jesus 

this last
write

              ****


red adam
red at night

shown your red winged life already
torn from monism's ghosting imagination

see it doubling the grotesque we’ve
read at night

who can make nothing
of it now?

            ****

we don’t even know
we've fallen into water―know

this red-winged black reflection
as ensouling presence―the ghosts’

“ghost” in the melting pot
we once were―see it and believe

what ghosts where dark men require
discrimination

not in black and white but
in how one will have read

"good people"  
"just" person

out of this differing twoness
where we peck away

the old way we've read;
the difficulty of our dying

laid to rest
and hatched

            ****

let knowing and loving
unite where death

feeds you freshly hatched
out of your sensual landscape

beyond matters
celebrating decay en mass

            ****

death threads life in what
death wants soul-making clothed in:

an unknown
god

where no way back faces each alone in the alone
where it alone represents itself to us again

red at night
black and white

may we each find our way

in a new red egg & spring

©2016 No Way A Seed; A Word Alone A Red Egg At Night: The New Math
           stephanie pope mythopoetry.com


Re: GOP Statisticians Develop New Branch Of Math To Formulate Scenarios In Which Trump Doesn’t Win Nomination - The Onion sent along by poet Randy Lusk- http://www.theonion.com/article/gop-statisticians-develop-new-branch-math-formulat-52463



notes


Romans 5: 5-11 read by Clarence Thomas 

MAID OF WATER MADE OF FIRE : On Eternal Springs and Spring Eternal

WHEN SHE FELL THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE WORLD

He threw a shell on the little bird
and made her wings bleed

then yellow and stellar a stair
how the stare of her throat did sing

till that red-winged blackbird of summer
red-winged in torn descent decayed.

Stained with seed the altar cloth
of time, time-worn through and through 

scarecrow in a blue gown wreathed
stained with seed and worn-out, too.

In a field thrice priapic
she laid her egg and died; a field

thrice as fallow as
her red-winged eye.

A new white egg a bird-price bled
this air that fled had paid

an eye for
an eye―she laid this path!

as if color, alone invoked
both dread and promise

right where she so faded bled
back to black reflection

till all of night
wore red.

©2016 RED NIGHT FEN GIRL stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

notes
The first line of the poem reflects a Chitimacha legend of the bayou, the red-winged a mythological figure. The red-winged blackbird is a passerine bird of the family Icteridae, from the Greek “ikteros” meaning “jaundiced one.” Red-wings frequent marshes.  I am using the word, “fen” for marsh because I have traced the word to my Italian father’s mother’s father’s family name which translates to fen or marsh. This mythological figure joins those already existing in the night fen.

 In this manner I am staying with the image of a fathered daughter giving birth to her own motherhood by drawing its pattern forth out of a time before time. The sense-making of psyche’s psyche-making that of imitating Aphrodite’s girlhood in the sea.  The sea would be “virgin time.” Images in the poem belong to other poems that precede it forming a poem series and perhaps, marking a via transformativa traced just after waking from a strange dream.  Here is the dream briefly sketched.

The dream me discovers a very young girl’s ghost has attached itself to her.  The ghost child had died suddenly long ago and I didn’t ever hear how this occurred but as the dream progressed I discovered how this happened. She attached herself to me just as I was fleeing for higher ground during a natural disaster of some sort that had caused some flooding of low-lying land. I had stayed ahead of it until just this moment I am delayed.

 She knew she was a ghost child and seemed very happy to see me.  It is as if those words do not do the elation on the young disfigured child’s face justice. I loved her, suddenly realizing how much.  We decided to set out together when we were overcome by a sudden rush of water. The water was lit up and healthy on one side but dark and deadly on another side.  She was standing on the side that drew her under the dark side of the water and I knew she had instantly drowned. 

Yet, my impulse was to dive for her and I caught myself realizing that had I done this, I would have succumbed to the illness in the water. It is then I realize her selfless love and the act that caused her death a long time ago that keeps her saving the lives of others ever more.  Some psychic energy is bodiless logos and protective in the role it plays.

 I now turn to try and find my way alone.  A number of women begin climbing up onto a mountain path and I see one woman that I feel knows how to save herself so I follow behind her. 

The mountain path she takes eventually led us both down to the underworld beneath the mountain.  It turns out this is how to reach the higher ground after all. 

All the women ascending seem to know me, just as the young child seemed to know me. When we reach a safe spot I begin to feel warm and dry.  But as for the woman that led me here and the young child that dies, I cannot remember what either look like because I cannot see them clearly in the dream. 

I do realize in the dream I am in a feminine realm and that being in the feminine realm itself means these two women specifically, are different versions of femininity at different stages of transformation in its “supernatural existence” (that is, in the shocking state of seeing through the eye of nonbeing where , in the form of my dream "I" my ego soul has yet to experience eternal existence/s... !) Here each mythological life reflects a miniature and a superheroine. The tiny and the grotesque seem to be how I experience the child’s face when I call it disfigured. I don’t know what to say about the unknown woman.  She seemed both visually youthful and of an unidentifyable age--somehow both young and old at once, old in the sense of archetypally aged yet old age never is possible for her.  I am thinking now the jaundiced one is a reference to the spiritually alive within the via transformativa during its yellowing phase.  When I awaken what I awaken with is the white egg of the red-wing. This is the word as egg showing new life in the fen just as I awaken. Just as I awaken, so too, in dream a fen again wakes through springs eternal. This dream reminds me of the pattern of inspiration told in the tale of Kastalia, perhaps a clue to that side of the waters  where I stand in the dream which I think are lit up or on fire or “waters of light”.  This fiery water, a landscape giving rise to a human identity, makes up the dream me. It gives the dream substance just as it gives the dream me a reflection for the waking me to see. The colors that color it seem significantly substantial, too, as if they are the matter being gathered into earth.   

UNDER THE SPELL OF HORSES

RED AT NIGHT BOTH BLACK AND WHITE

You and I at sunset
inherit racism
our blackness

a christic night― white mythology
feeding horses red adam
in a descending series.

The horses know we must
see how they see
the apples that have us?

Those horses re cognize
our appetitive eros― have
we must

& should & ought & our parentalisms peal without pea(r)l
peal unpeeled (still red outside and white within the spell as if)
retracing her trace, red at night and winged

what part of monism doesn't have all of us
rose from the sea
falling from above

©2016 Under The Spell of Horses stephanie pope mythopoetry.com


notes1. A response to the poem, I Fall Drowsy (March 1, 2016)by Richard Lance Scow Williams.

i fall drowsy
the horses
know i
have
apples
i know i
must feel
sweetly indebted
to things enclosed
all those cages
locked doors
barred windows
barbed wire electric fences
prisons jails lock ups dungeons
we tell stories that justify our violence
as a natural consequence
of being an animal
reverse engineer
in a line that
reinforces
a predilection
proving simultaneously
our exceptionalism & our being
subject to brutal but natural impulses
o stories that we tell stories to
i protested that a photo
posted on FaceBook
seemed to be at
hard odds with
Christian values
a responder said:
    stop using Jesus
i asked: against racism?
the link went quiet
drowsy America
Tarot has it
the chains
on the Devil
are always loose
meaning one can slip
out of illusion at any time
i grab a bag of apples
& walk to the field

2.  Under The Spell Of Horses is sparked by both the line in the poem, I Fall Drowsy, "stop using Jesus" and a photo of the funeral service for the late Justice Anthony Scalia. On the altar cloth is a reference to Jesus as the logos spermatikos. It reads, "The seed is the word of god." Justice Clarence Thomas is speaking.

When I saw the line in the poem "stop using jesus" I had the thought that it may not refer to racism. That is, it may not be to the sorry business of racism to which this line refers but to a certain psychic, archetypal pattern, a mythic dominant interpreted as conferring divine status to certain men on earth, privileging a certain interpretation from which is created a rule of law. The archetypal pattern to which I refer is, of course, the logos spermatikos. This archetypal pattern is the one some scholars say is that to which the Platonic Dialogues address calling this form of eros "socratic".  It is what first recognizes the "I don't know" you and I and everyone else doesn't yet know...which is like the flea that tells us the apple is rotten. The socratic gadfly wakes us up. What we have lost is the sense of twoness to which the logos spermatikos refers, knowing and loving. What law can put god in your heart?

Supposedly Plato recognizes in the Socratic form of erotic loving  that knowing and loving are somehow the same thing and more than an appetitive eros, erotic loving is not about having something.  It is about being something. This is "logos spermatikos".  Be a sensual place in your natural depths.

Supposedly, too, theological scholars suggest this pattern that is the birth of philosophy was known to the biblical John and written into John's gospel which then attributes this pattern to the historical Jesus imaginally.  In your natural death, your sensual place is like the rotting seed in the dark earth giving rise to Psyche's orchard, psyche-making, a second Aphrodite.


This suggests to me now we can all reach this state of eros inherited imaginally by turning back this past still present in ourselves, soul as that killing into being within ourselves; psyche's psyche-making rising up in the life force. This must be the timeless sea of the world to which the night garden returns us.

There is an old story that Aphrodite spends her early years with a playmate in the sea of the world during the time before time.  When Zeus calls her to Olympos she gives her playmate, Nerites a pair of wings to try and coax him to go with her. He refuses.  It is then she reclaims her wings and, rising from the sea, gives them to Eros of Olympos.  Those wings!  They are hers!  Early Aphrodite...  a winged woman; the world sea, Aphrodite's vulva is world time not of earth but of the virgin's garden out of which grows the logos spermatikos, her desirable apple orchard. That makes Psyche of the tale, Psyche & Eros this site where loving and knowing unite in oneself while remaining not one's ego soul at the same time. This site acknowledges twoness. In our twoness I and the other are one deeply feminine and we are reborn lifted up in rich soil like the branches of a tree lift having risen out of the sensual place in its natural depths.