In retrospect I can see my plight: there was no proclamation of God’s provision for the likes of me – a refugee from the psychedelic occult, the devil having gained close access to my mind and spirit while in that realm – which marvelous provision I gladly avail myself of nowadays, and vigorously teach to all and sundry. For example, there is the energy that comes from having perfect spiritual rest, and the heart (courage, morale) that comes from being perfectly loved, the both of which together translate into Resurrection Power, which may be quiet and unassuming, yet is the vitality of God in lives and situations. If we as a spiritual community are secure in our Savior’s love and care, and are full of His Spirit as we increasingly know the depths and heights and breadths of His heart for us, we will have a strong and pure energy for activities that glorify Him and help our fellow humans. Such things are the nourishing fruit of sound doctrine and godly preaching.
But this was not what I knew. Instead of learning all that God had done for me, had actually provided to sustain and nurture me in the difficulties of new spiritual life and godliness, I was taught what I must do for God, to please Him, and to attain that degree of holiness that supposedly enables one to enter His presence. The key to this was self-effort and austerity. Add to this a serious deception (the compulsory fasting route), and you get profound spiritual failure.
Even when I wasn’t doing anything wrong – sinful – I reckoned myself (an otherwise good Biblical concept from Romans 6) to be in a state of sin / disobedience. So much depends upon what one believes to be true! And there I was.
After the breakdown when her mom died, Sue had taken off to Canada, whereabouts unknown, and I took (just turned) 3-year-old Nadine and moved to a small apartment on East 4th Street a little west of 1st Avenue, a fifth floor walk-up, 3 room railroad flat – bathtub in the kitchen – for around $80 a month.
I was driving a yellow cab at this point, and Nadine stayed with one or another church family we were close to while I drove the taxi three nights a week, 4 PM to around 4 AM. That was the money shift, without a lot of traffic jams, although there was more danger at night. The meter racks up money faster moving than sitting in traffic, and passengers are happier.
* * * * *
The fallen warrior-priest occultist-poet lived for a while in the limbo of spiritual isolation – utter ontologic aloneness – and his spirit was slowly suffocating. In these days he met a woman on the Lower East Side of Manhattan struggling to carry a table along the street to her apartment. It was the winter of early 1976; she looked Russian, her head wrapped in scarves like a babushka, her body covered in a heavy overcoat. He offered to help her, and from this encounter began the book this story is part of, A Great And Terrible Love.
It turned out she wasn’t Russian, but Mexican and English, evidently well-born, considering the way she carried herself, Teresa Mercedes, an artist in the modern dance. He mistook an unusually-placed Spanish punctuation mark in a note she wrote him to indicate a strong affection on her part toward him (it was not her intention, he learned later), but his passionate response kindled a fire in her, and they came together.
I knew a Spanish maid
hair most lovely dark
as a waterfall
of light
fierce black fire
of the Spanish maid
She was proud
and wild
and lay with
whom she loved
It was a strange alchemy of heart wrought by her entrance into his life; it effected a change that quickened him against the death slowly eating away his breath, a principle of life imparted to him: eros, the power in ontologic-erotic union, and she came to him,
a queen of terrible bearing
her breasts very banners
of loveliness
eyes like lightning
and her love as fierce
as Death.
He did not pull any punches revealing his heart to her. When he told her he was vampiric in spirit – for thus it is with those who fall from glory into the abyss – she said he was being “melodramatic,” but he had to declare his state truly or he could not be loved as he actually was. As he wrote he cried,
Oh how I fear to take pen in hand
not knowing if the drop of pure heart
it is dipped in
will burn as acid
our love
yet this is my life
or death
It was short-lived, his union with Teresa, but it opened a door for him – for his very spirit and life! – providing an escape from the onslaught of Thanatos devouring him within; a human does not fall from Heaven but is vulnerable to excruciating and multifarious death. He sensed their end coming. She had consulted the I Ching and told him she received these phrases: “an undertaking,” “abysmal waters,” and “tears of blood.” Caring nothing for that form of divination, he took the words and put them in a poem, which he gave her at what he told her would be their last time together:
THE UNDERTAKING
Into the abysmal
waters of death
she plunged,
strong-hearted in love
to pull from their midst
a sore-wounded man.
He called himself Jonah,
and she loved him dearly.
He healed at her touch.
But Jonah was a marked man
under the hand of his God,
and so heavy of heart
she cried out in pain
from his words,
and knew her undertaking
was nigh done:
from the waters she saved him
and gave him breath
from her own life.
Then a great storm arose
and he said, Save yourself,
cast me forth into the sea,
for I know that for my sake
this great tempest is upon you,
and you know how I have fled
from the presence of the LORD.
And with these words they wept
tears of blood.
And she cast him forth
into the storm.
* * *
How her Jonah fared,
and she herself,
is not yet written.
It is from this point that his odyssey proper began (and oddly – not being into numerology – ended seven years to the day in the last poem of A Fire In the Lake); an odyssey not only in the hearts of women, but in the world of letters, and in the world of spirits and occult practitioners.
A word about “the occult”: its root meaning is hidden (from view), concealed, covered over, coming from the Latin occulere; in medicine it is used as in the terms “occult blood in the stool,” or “occult carcinoma.” It is used here in a neutral sense, not specifically referring to demonic practitioners (as common usage does) unless so indicated. The prayers (and prayer warfare!) of a saint as well as the spells of a sorcerer are both in the realm of the occult – hidden from human eyes! – or so is the use of this word in these writings.
The title, A Great and Terrible Love Affair, first occurred to him in his days with Donna Lee, seeing the terrible (and yet wondrous) nature of their relationship, as well that with the Lord who bore with him – as with all His people – who loved so wretched a character with a steadfast and unfailing love! But this Lord was also a terrible Lover, for He was capable of severely wounding those He loved to get them back to Him and stay with Him, as the proverbial shepherd who breaks the leg of a young lamb prone to wander and keeps it in the tent to bond with him as he cares for it in its helplessness, that bond remaining strong even when the lamb is healed and grown! A great and terrible love on many levels, this living story!
It was strange how the great sin of taking Teresa as his paramour quickened him (please understand, this writing is not to justify anything evil that was done, but to tell of events, inward and outward). This “quickening” was not of that sort which tends to life, the true sense of life which results from union with the God of life, wherein we partake of the divine nature, and the life we then live in this world being a foretaste of eternal life; no, the life – the new vitalizing power – which came from erotic-ontologic union with Teresa gave him the energy and heart (as in the French, le courage) to begin an odyssey, even upon the heartlands floor of the howling Abyss. In this region the “ground” sometimes disappears and one finds oneself suspended in the netherworld with vast blackness overhead and seething unfathomable depths below. Years later, commenting on this phenomenon, the poet wrote,
For years I lived by the love of woman, and by that love was kept aloft over roaring whirlpool Thanatos of the subtle spheres. Eros triumphed over Thanatos (for a while), and although the telling of it was “pornographic,” it in itself was of redeeming value. If the will to live is to be valued over the will to die, that is. ….But Eros proved to be salvation with a small “s,” for the ways of earthly love are not stable.
In fact, our poet struggled greatly against the will to die. He was suffused by it before she came, cut off from any other ontologic connection – his daughter was precious to him, but this was not a union of beings, she not being an ontologic equal – and that included especially the Lord, from whom he believed he had been separated by his “sin.” Still being possessed of spiritual sight, he discerned in the “seething unfathomable depths below” a power and intelligence projecting into him a will to die. He knew this had been termed thanatos in classic psychoanalytic literature, but he saw it was the heart of the demon prince, Satan, whose spirit was in all those not in union with God, causing some severely wounded ones to despair of life. Particularly in those who were in utter isolation from other human beings, this baleful influence worked powerfully, eating away at the core of being, till there was no strength to resist. The poet called it Thanatos with a capital “T” because it was in truth a person, albeit a spirit.
It was as though a great whirlpool in the subtle sphere, drawing him slowly to its terrible maw – where he saw in the depths of it a horrid and malign satisfaction at his impending demise – and against which he had no strength to fight, had begun the inexorable process of devouring him! He had even bought a long-bladed knife to still his blood.
This was the same abyss he had been rescued from in the story, “St. Louis Blues to Conversion,” but now the veil was removed from his eyes, and he saw the intelligences plotting the destruction of humans, and in particular, his! There was a quiet terror in his heart, for he had the care of his 3-year-old girl on his mind as well.
So when Teresa came near, he gladly – desperately! – drew her to him, and became one flesh and spirit with her. There is indeed a power to eros in withstanding Thanatos, for to be held in the ontologic embrace of another heart is to be not alone, and the power of Thanatos is held at bay.
WILL EVER A GREAT POET
visit this earth again?
And if so
what will he/she be like?
Will they be ignorant
of drugs
and the places our heads go
thereby?
Will they be ignorant
of the road
and this generation of pilgrims,
ignorant of the rape
of our earth
by the "respectable,"
ignorant of true speech
and heart music,
ignorant of how we yearn
and suffer,
how we are besieged by madmen
in costumes,
how we love
at grave peril
to our hearts?
Will they be academic stiffs
too dry to swallow,
or will they be loved
by us?
“how we love / at grave peril / to our hearts”! The other edge of the sweet blade of love is that if it leaves it cuts its way out and we are not only alone but rent and opened to that in the abyss. Often the two wills of lovers cannot abide in union – such is our essential self-centeredness – and one often hears of those who die “of heart-break.”
Now he was in her ontologic embrace, and she in his. She did not know the regions she had taken into herself when she took him in. But he knew. When he confessed to being a vampire, she didn’t understand. He clung to her as to very life. To be loved by her…yes, it was his evil heart; but the One who is sovereign sends even the ants and birds on their paths and winds, and He sent her, even as crossing the paths of Samson and Delilah. (If she yet lives, Lord, grant her mercy, draw her to You, reveal Yourself to her, grant her Your saving life, please!) And he said to Him in those days, “I will not give her up. You will have to take her from me Yourself.” And so came the spiritual storm, even as Jonah knew the Sender of the storm on the sea.
The names desperado and outlaw are not alien to the poet when he ponders his life and heart, for surely he is made of that cloth. But he knew himself as His desperado, His outlaw, beloved by Him though the world hate him for the wretch he is, or rather, had been!
As the poem foresaw, she did cast him forth into the storm. It was a storm of darkness, passion, faith-not-entirely-extinguished, wrath, love, and horror, and it was of long duration. Yet he entered it as a new man – he had been loved as he was!
O I knew a Spanish maid
by she became I man
loved by woman
Somehow this had confirmed him in his being and he now had the heart to live. It was a gift – un cadeau terrible – a terrible gift; perhaps the giving of it somehow wounded her, bereft her of something essential. (If she yet lives, watch over her, O Most High, protect this one who succored Your outlaw son, and pulled him from depths too strong for him; O great King, have mercy on this one, please! Reveal the light of Your countenance to her.)
Hers also was a love great and terrible. With a heart fierce to live he proceeded from her arms and tears – the embrace of her heart – on what was to be an odyssey into depths that would overturn the pale wasteland of T.S. Eliot: a journey into the abyss in the human heart. An odyssey on the surface of the world – Apokalypse Field outside the gates of Eden – and in the horrors of the netherworld in the consciousness of humankind.
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
will never be written
because, first, who cares
for even a great sprawling fiction
since there is not one Dostoevsky alive
to fill it with living vision
and then, again, who cares
for but another fantasy
however shot thru with genius
in these archetypal days of our reality
no, a novel is a plaything
of genius, and peoples
to make up for the absence
of an epic Poet
only the actual matters
anymore, only the truth
of these our lives & this our world
has any relevance whatsoever
and it is in the works
THE GREAT AMERICAN POEM
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