The Circuitous Journey The sonnets on this CD wrestle with no less overwrestled a pantheon (and in no particular order of imputed deific powers) as: Robert Graves’ White Goddess, Gnosticism's Sophia, Prometheus, Leviathan, Lucifer, Yahweh, Dylan Thomas, Aleister Crowley, Samuel Beckett, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, the Minotaur, Dionysus, Apollo and most frightening of all, the dreaded Significant Other (of whom I feel Edith Hamilton could have done more to prepare us.) There are also a few "recursive" sonnets where the sonnet --via the sonnet-- decries the limitations and conventions of the sonnet. I've always been intrigued by the conundrum of content petitioning form. For example, if a leopard renounces its spots, what skin does it presume to inhabit during the moment of abnegation? I am reminded of The Honeymooners' Ralph Cramden, who hatches plots of ludicrous self-escape then suffers horrendous consequences only to reconcile sheepishly with his wife Alice. In the futility of escape, great humor can be found --mainly because escape is never really an option. The journey is a circuitous one, if it can even be said that we "depart" at all. Among the poets, Samuel Coleridge explicated this powerful notion of circularity to greatest effect. For him, the tail-devouring serpent, the ouroboros (Greek for "tail-eater") represented the perfectly shaped poem: "The common end of all narrative, nay of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole; to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a straight Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion --the snake with its Tail in its Mouth." --- Collected Letters IV (1815) Indeed in true Jungian archetypal fashion, the ouroboros is omnipresent (it appears within these pages as the watermark). Aztec, Chinese and Egyptian mythologies, to name a few far-flung cultures, employ the ouroboros. T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets is an ouroboros structure in both form and content. The same for Plato's Republic with the perfect state meticulously assembled and dismantled within the walls of the work itself. The ouroboros recurs in Gnostic texts as the symbol of reconciliation and self-containment, the androgyne. For me, the damaged ozone layer is the ouroboros breached, the Great World Serpent, our atmos- -phere, bleeding murderous rays down upon our heads. Indeed there is a darker, nihilistic side to the ouroboros. For example, the distraught spouse who murders his wife and children before killing himself is attempting to close his own desperate circle. Wrong-headed, he plots a retreat to oblivion rather than a return to unity. The sub-title of this Sonnet Odyssey, "Return to One", is a derivation of the alchemical Codex Marcianus' subtitle for the ouroboros: "The One, The All", and was suggested to me by a very dear friend as the CD title. My own Gnostic leanings inform a number of these sonnets. Briefly, I believe the spirit (pneuma) and intellect (psyche) must relearn the art of harmonious unity and unlearn the vice of hubris, the latter being the advanced manifestation of an alienated intellect. For an artist, spiritual healing involves surfacing "gnosis" (Greek for knowledge) through the creative process which is itself an act of remembering; here again, with the stress on a circular versus linear perception of reality. Literally, this process is anamnesis or the loss of amnesia, like the falling away of earthly scales. As Plato noted, knowledge is not acquired so much as it is reclaimed from a buried place within ourselves. Emerson speaks of the poet's duty to excavate a poetry which "was all written before time was." Poetry is self-knowledge in its essential form; the fruits borne of our anamnestic labors. Sophia abets this recognition process often in harsh ways, although her cruelties are meted out in strict proportion to the depravities we visit upon the natural order of things. I am struck, for example, by the appearance of the Ebola virus in the late 20th century with its noted penchant for killing doctor and patient alike. The Ebola is another of nature's assaults on the hubris of man, this time targeting the doctor/patient firewall --a Promethean "light-bringer" mythography. These cozy relationships, enshrined by the Apollonian, are long overdue for their comeuppance. Melting polar ice caps and ozone holes are biospheric manifestations of the Goddess' wrath, which itself is both a mask of her vulnerability as well as a barometer of her own fear. We cannot cure; we can only comfort. That is what Cerridwen instructs through the harsh lesson of Ebola. I suspect the White Goddess, in alliance with her cohorts, Gaia (Zeus' regretful mother and co-conspirator against Cronus and the Titans) and Sophia (the Wisdom aeon who visits Eve in the Garden in serpent guise) will increasingly resort to biological means, in an effort to turn humankind from its unholy alliance with an unchecked male-principle; or, if need be, eradicate us entirely for the greater good of the planet. After all, the gods are not beholden to us; indeed many of them detest us. A number of my sonnets address the battle for --if not the healing of-- the divided human soul in its many archetypal representations: male vs. female, Apollonian vs. Dionysian, reason vs. gnosis, etc. Another fascinating archetype is the Minotaur. Picasso grasped the resurgent relevance of the half-bull, half-man and displayed it variously within his work. I am delighted at being permitted to use his Minotauromachie (1935) as I feel it is his greatest evocation of the beast. In the mid-thirties during the height of his Minotaur fixation, Picasso was pre-occupied with the totalitarian clouds gathering over Europe. Often, the creature appears as a blight in an otherwise pastoral scene. Picasso was a Minotaur, often referring to himself as such, a point noted by Arianna Huffington in her book Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. In a broader sense, the Minotaur embodies the vanquishing of gentility by the forces of primitivism. The Minotaur is the rock star come to town, having his way with starry-eyed groupies. The art of David Bowie, consummate rock star (and credible painter) employs the Minotaur frequently.

Beware the proliferating Minotaur because destruction cannot be far behind. As Rochelle Gurstein suggests in her book The Repeal of Reticence, we live in the aftermath of cultural defeat. The forces of exposure, having thoroughly overwhelmed the forces of reticence, complete the coarsening of Western culture in the latter half of the 20th century. Our culture is in its decadent phase though as fastidious historian Jacques Barzun hastens to remind us, decadence is not a "slur" but merely a technical designation. In fact, as Barzun suggests in From Dawn to Decadence, a decadent period "is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance." Might such restlessness absent an historical imperative explain the vague but overwhelming sense of fatigue so many people complain of today, the massive pharmacological "propping up" demanded of Prozac and Zoloft? What can be more poignant than decent, right-minded people adrift in decadent times? I am no advocate of the anti-depressant movement (barring of course genuine biochemical imbalances) as I believe it blunts despair, a very real and necessary historical force. For those who do attend their angst, I have the greatest empathy. Within this psychic carnage, the Minotaur is an ascendant archetype. Answerable only to his own appetites, he rapes the dispirited and alienates their children. An opportunist, he excels in periods of decay and thus is emancipated from the malaise. His army is the rising tide of sociopaths, serial killers, pornographers, rock stars and schoolyard killers. I take solace in the fact that we are still in the grips of a great cycle; though clearly at a low ebb. I mean, had it been offered I would have gladly chosen the Renaissance or third century BC Athens. But who knew? Things will change. However I believe they must get far worse first. The New Age, like the New Economy is, for our time at least, a tantalizing fiction. The process of writing these sonnets allowed me to grasp, really for the first time, the pernicious aspects of our culture's patriarchal tendencies and the deeply-rooted misogynistic subtext of the Western canon. My goodness, might this process have minted me a feminist? I shudder at the thought of having to sharpen my resentments. By now, the dubious historicity of the pre-Indo-European Goddess culture has been duly noted by a number of scholars. My first significant encounter with this theory occurred a few years ago with the reading of Riane Eisler's brilliant but perhaps hyper-utopian book, The Chalice and the Blade and then later, with readings of the great feminist archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas. The absence of a confirming archaeological record notwithstanding, the theory loses none of its luster to a poet. Once again, Robert Graves precedes everyone. His 1955 introduction to Greek Myths postulates that mythology was in fact supplanted by history with the demise of the Goddess/Priestess and the ascendancy of the hereditary King eager to retain his title, enshrine his exploits and prolong his life beyond the lunar cycle when --traditionally as the Goddess' consort-- he had been sacrificed in prototypical boy-toy fashion. So we find that, millennia before the divine right of kings was codified (largely by the 17th century English royalist Sir Robert Firmer in reaction to Papist political ambitions), it had already become, in Mel Brooks' words, "good to be da king." Certainly the mythological record, if not the historical one, is rife with the usurpation theme: a patriarchal social order eclipsing a matrilinear one. Take for example Homer's depiction of the Sirens (and let me hasten to disassociate Robert Graves from this particular notion.) My recent readings convince me that the Sirens' task, seen through the prism of their own feminine selves was not to navigate man to a rocky ruin, but rather to navigate him away from the disaster predestined by his steadfast adherence to an endless succession of "projects": an infernal sequence of rash action followed by unintended consequence e.g. social strife, wars and their aftermaths, industrial revolutions and ozone depletion. Moreover the histrionic tales of strewn ships and skeletal remains reported by Ulysses' crew (of course no women are among them) typify the cautionary tales shared between men to keep each others' backs to the oars, their heads bowed, deaf and duty-bound. Ulysses does not relate the Siren encounter extemporaneously but only by way of flashback to King Alcinous of Phaeacia; by this time, the sea yarn has accreted motive and agenda. The fear of seduction, the fear of poetic rapture are stowaways on Ulysses' ship. So the price of relenting to the Sirens may be death. Indeed Cerridwen can promise nothing but death to her attentive suitors as death conforms to the cycle of things. The bid for Olympus (human immortality itself being an existential oxymoron) spurs men to heroic acts often with devastating, not to mention ecosystem altering, results. I have thus come to doubt the hero's moral compass and his self-aggrandizing thirst for adventure. Still more shocking is the Judeo-Christian scandal perpetrated against Eve in the Garden. The serpent is the female agent of wisdom, Sophia, sent to alert Eve (Adam "naps" in ignorance; the "omniscient" Yahweh must confront the pair in order to extract the details of the transgression). And yet, in a breathtaking reversal, the Hebrew patriarchs demonize Eve for consorting with Evil. Who but a man could have written Genesis, and an embittered one at that? More than three thousand years later, the female still labors under this vicious character assassination. Meanwhile, the earth, under Adam's (and later, mad Ahab's) "stewardship", hurtles towards a ruinous point of no return. Can we be rescued in time? Perhaps. But it will be the Mother -- and not Daedalus' tinkering in the laboratory-- which will save us. As a start, we must relinquish the Project, remove the wax from our ears, and listen to the Sirens' beautiful, haunting sound as it reverberates through poetry's homage to the Earth. By the mere act of listening, we will detain ourselves from further mischief. More fortunate listeners might find themselves transformed.