For more than two years she'd laboured to draw nearer her quarry, to feel what she felt, know what she knew, to think her thoughts. Two years of struggling over an incline so slight as to render any upward progress imperceptible, then, just ahead a sudden vista
like a door opening onto the sea
. In the work of Octavio Paz, Beulah detects an echo, a reflection of a formulation that carries her forward through her own research like a mantra:
swallow the worldâ¦
.
The following would be, incredibly enough, high ground for Beulah, from which she could look back over her struggles, her furies and frustrations, her sacrifices.
[7 Sept. 1994]
It's HEREâin
Paz
, everything I've been looking for.
Thank you O Paz!âpoetic dialectic: sky = visual hymn; hymn = audible sky
. Juana in her cellâher books instruments collectedâshe reads and listens ⦠inward ear tuned to an audible sky. Echoes incast, winding ever more tightly down to silence. She writes, whispers verses, her eyes scan the outcast sky for hymns. Reads like no one has ever read swallows the boundaries splitting her from a sky of promises ⦠writes in ink an echo distillate, turns inside out, lungs ovaries diaphragm, fallopian tubaâthe instrument of our fallibility our fallâdispersed, immersed, dissolved a squid in ink projected. Swallow and integrate or be digested. Dissolute. Assimilate. Double-headed dialectic that civilizes as it kills. Dog Head thrown back howling at a sky of mirrorsâhigh hyena whine, o hymnal hyenaeâyou'll never get enough never know enough never love be loved enoughâthen Ox Head rips you deep down low / spills coral entrails across a marble floor of echoesâ¦.
From time to time I find myself rereading passages such as these. One must after all try to imagine Beulah happy. But as on previous occasions, the happy moment was brief, a sense of triumph even at the turning point of defeat. The ground was never solid beneath her, struggling as she did to each sand dune's crest only to stare out over countless others, over endless ranks of barren breakers, stacked monuments to the wind.
I cannot help seeing Beulah hunched over her notebook, scabbed knuckles whitening around a pencil stub, blinds drawn against the day, the room's strew and scatter of books, junk food wrappers and encrusted plates more squalid in the gloomâ¦.
If youth is not wasted on the young, surely ambition is.
6
She had been determined to run every lead to ground, every allusion, every reference, every myth along the way. Yet even if from the outset she'd recognized the objective for what it wasâthe virtual sum of human knowledgeâstill this might have been insufficient to discourage her. At any rate, Beulah finds her method of approach bringing her time and again to the brink of an abyss of complexity beyond her human grasp.
In a chapter devoted to
First Dream
Octavio Paz initiates Beulah in the vast literature on the âvoyage of the soul' and medieval dream theory ⦠Paz on Sor Juana's greatest work:
In
First Dream
she relates that, while her body slept, her soul ascended to the upper sphere; there her soul had a vision so intense, so vast, so luminous and dazzling, that she was blinded; once recovered, she longed to ascend again, now, step by step, but she could not; as she was wondering what other path she might take, the sun rose and her body awakened. The poem is the account of a spiritual vision that ends in a nonvisionâ¦.
Enchanted by the image of souls in transit while we sleep, for the first time in months Beulah finds herself not just cannibalizing texts for quotes and selective truths, but actually reading again. Inspired, she plunges headlong into the literature Paz cites: Athanasius Kircher's
Iter exstaticum
, Artemidorus'
Onirocriticon
, Cicero's
The Dream of Scipio
, Macrobius'
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio â¦
But after a two-week binge of consuming texts she lifts her head, synapses crackling, fluorescing with points of lightâand feels no closer than before. A sharp swing in mood, a return to a familiar pattern. Her notes here revert to near incoherence and to her sedentary fetishesââthe rank red-gummed rotting smile / the stink of failure clinging to my clothes like fearâanimals and children smell it on meâ¦.'
What moves her at this precise point to copy the following quotation?âan exercise of sympathetic magic, a conjuring. Or maybe it is just to write down something coherent.
First Dream
is the first example of an attitudeâthe solitary soul confronting the universeâ¦. The solitary confrontation is a religious theme, like that of the voyage of the soul, but religious in a negative way: it denies revelation. More precisely, it is the revelation of the fact that we are alone and that the world of the supernatural has dissipated. In one way or another, all modern poets have lived, relived, and re-created the double negation of
First Dream:
the silence of space, and the vision of the nonvision. The great and until now unrecognized originality of Sor Juana's poem resides in this fact. And this is the basis for its unique place in the history of modern poetryâ¦.
7
Hardly, it seems, has Beulah taken Paz as spirit guide than he teaches that Sor Juana, unlike all the dream voyagers who had ever gone before her, travelled without a guide. Maybe this is why Beulah is now so quick to discard Paz, her esteemed guide and teacherâagain, the familiar pattern: blame the teacher, not the method. Hoping to limit the avenues of approach by following him, she has instead discovered them hugely multiplied. She has badly underestimated the breadth of Paz's erudition but, more, she has once again failed to grasp the fundamental lesson: the labyrinth that is one mind. And so, repenting her ill-invested hopes she finds herself alone again. Perhaps it is in that solitude that she came closest to joining her Sor Juana.
At any rate, it seems strange that she should think herself at another dead end just as she is led from medieval dream theory to the sprawling corpus of labyrinth scholarship; and that in the very midst of a tangled bower, our maze-runner stumbles at wits' end into a vast library devoted to ⦠labyrinths. Despite her own childhood intimations, Beulah was not at all prepared for the reach of the maze phenomena across the ages and around the globe, from Neolithic Scandinavia to Tierra del Fuego to the hedge mazes of twentieth-century Nova Scotia.
This business of labyrinths must seem to the modern reader quaint and antic, his most recent acquaintance stemming perhaps from childhood trips through the fun-house mazes of seedy carnivals. And hedge mazesâ
really
. Even those of us craving the exotic, the mildly dangerous, would find ourselves hard-pressed to conjure anything more threatening here than some geriatric Priapus hobbling through a set of well-trimmed alleys with a silver tea service in one hand and a set of bloodied pruning shears in the other.
If the reader's patience had not already been sufficiently taxed, one might sample the catalogue Beulah was about to acquaint herself with: mazes
in malo
and
in bono;
mazes with centres and without; mazes concealing grail or monstrosity; mazes in two, three or four dimensions; the maze as pleasure dome, bower of lust; mazes of the mind and mazes of the bodyâpalaces of the intestines
â
âinner pathways of ear, brain, bowelsâ¦.
Yet all of this would amount to no more than an arrangement of markers charting the maze as
idea
.
In 1967, at Montréal's World Exposition, more than one and a half million people lined up for hours on end at the
Labyrinthes
Pavilion for one thing: an authentic
experience
of the maze. For this is precisely what is lacking today, not the view from above but the view from within. Not the thin, tepid washâthe littered flood of meaningless information, but the avatar it displaced: the deep, blue dive into an infinite complexity. What most eludes our grasp today is not the maze as idea, but as experience. Or so my own research has suggested. What the fair-goers in Montréal are on the verge of discovering is that each maze-runner is the architect of his own labyrinth, each forking in the path is marked by his doubts, each passageway excavated by his questions, each blind alley walled in by his ignorance and errors and pretensions. From metaphors to myths and on to dreams, thence to voyages of the soul and labyrinths, what we lack today is the experience of blundering through a maddening series of detours into the tangled heart of a mystery that conceals what we most fearâthat there a monster waits, and that it wears our face.
â
êkal tirâni
, the palace of the intestines evoked on the ancient Babylonian clay tablets describing divination by animal entrails
T
HE FOLLOWING ODDITY
seems addressed to me, though Beulah never sent it. Maybe it was intended to echo a certain strain in the Baroque, recalling the salty side of Donne or the Coy Mistress of Marvell or any number of romps by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochesterâ“The Disabled Debauchee,” to name one. I do not know how it was to be taken. I offer it here not as one of Beulah's amusements but as an exhibit in my defence.
Some background on the text. According to her notes, in pre-Hispanic Mexico there was a rite, since compared to that of the Christian Eucharist, that involved moulding an effigy of God out of amaranth or cornmeal moistened with blood, then proceeding to eat it with the cry:
Teocualo! God is eaten
. What I still cannot decide for myself is when she wrote thisâit was lying among other papers traceable to early 1994, which is to say, before she left Calgary. I can't even begin to imagine the strangeness she would have felt to have written this, only to experience the actual rite first-hand a few months later on a mountainside in Mexico.
I would be your makerâplease let me be.
There are other wonders a wheel can wreak.
Let me show you, you shall see
There's more to this than pounding meat.
âTop a wheel I'd throw youâ
yet like clay, not kindling,
not a breaking nor a grinding down
but a building upâfrom the ground.
I would spin you hard and long,
shape you on a potter's wheel
âmilled and turned, a meal
not of earth, but harvest corn.
To start:
these stiffening carpâ
your bony feet,
hamstring strung,
tarsal-finned,
arch, pedestrian.
Afoot! the nascent effigy:
tickle-ankled, razor shinnedâ
the fluted drumstick of
your fatted calves,
kidskin 'cased, racked
and pinioned to the knee
where it hollowsâ
a dollop's scalloped gap,
a nice cream scoop
of delicacy.
Soft-gloss't horse-meat
of your thighs: all but hairlessâ
unbranched cedarsâ
their striate checks
and bulges I'd
approximate
with celery sticks
(and Velveeta).
Next a platter nudgeâ
swift-trick, artfully turned:
about face, fella!
⦠to (dis)simulate
your low-slung base,
your bottomâglobed
with musk melon
or else, cantaloupe.
Still to assay, still untried:
the tough, reluctant nut between â¦
to probe and crack and crease
by a deft tongue's
delving auguries.
Then just athwart the tailbone's ridge,
that sacral scar mimicked
with an edgy bit
of star-fruit
toppingâ
heralding the unclasped bracelet
of your plaited
vertebrae.
Rising, still rising,
by cupped-palms sculpted,
just above that lightless
nethermoon (melon-saddled),
there squat the addled cod-cheeks
of your frowning, stub-winged
saddlebagsâO flightless
groundling Pegasus
of corn!
Ay, but that crab-back,
Tin Manânow there's the rub!:
savage concave, vexed â¦
blackfired and hardened
on cynicism and sun,
brazen of despair,
embrittled on distemper.
Pivotal point, fatal curveâ
invert it, crack and peel it back!
So, plattered on that convex carapace
together yet, might we dineâ
I thine, thou mineâ
as kings, as gods
as matched and
blissful equine
arthropods
browsing spines and thistles,
crowns-of-thorn,
men-o-warâ
we two: paired now,
fitted,
slow enstabled,
embayed, ensilted â¦
not delta-hilted
but spitted, gorged, and
lordly gored.
After that shelly back,
your doughy head's
a little simpler,
if by a hair and not
a ton;
stubborn topknot,
prickly scalp,
I've thought of cloaking it
in kelp.
For the features
of that dimpled faceâ
a knead, a
knuckle, a
pinch, a pokeâ
gouge the eyes,
thumb the nose,
cleave the chin,
fork the tongue.
That shepherd crook of larynx,
(by macaroni elbows, aped)
into your wishbone's flaring
V-neck, tucks, so
as not to rudely flop,
into the pulmonary
cranb'rry
sauce.
Gizzard, crop,
sweetbread mysteries
moulded, folded, rucked
like pennies in
a cake;
subsurface currants, plotted
in the vaunt and swagger
of that swelling plover's
chestâ
O Tin Man, lovelorn,
forlorn cockerel, crowing,
dying
to save face.
So now into that fowl barrenlandâ
breast of partridge, breast of quailâ
I would place a transplant
heart of amaranth meal â¦
dampened, formed,
blood-wetted through
a catheter of
thorn.
Thus emboldened, over
your blood-sped cadaver
heartened, spurred,
my tongue would trace
and serpent-track
a slippery pathâ
a zig-zag,
snail-silver,
tongue-lashed race.
To and fro, would I course pell-mellâ
chocolate nippleâmacaroon yonâ
over the belly's pursing velt,
leaping in long
marsupial bounds
âlong the grassy pout
of your abdomen.
I'd there pause, against
this salt-lick graze,
and on it place
the leech and linger
of my calf lips
âgroined, insatiateâ
and rash my chin on
that bearded nest's
asperities.
Seaweed beach, desert strand,
shovel-tongue, tremblehand â¦
I'd score and scour and palp and,
from this turbid littoral,
coax and glean
the rawâso raw!âmaterials
for the sandcastles of
our ecstasy.
On!,
my sickle fingers'
curlew swerve
o'er amaranth sand,
and in the hand
the brief-cupped, meaty curve
of thickening blood
in its silken gut;
Heft!
the swallow's
plum-swelled,
dewlap
nest;
Pluck!
the dew-harp's
gristled
fret;
Flush!
the nightingale
of flesh
to sing
its bloodrush
melodies;
Mark!
the long-
billed carnivore:
through sweet-stemmed
reed-brakes mapling sap,
a heron stalks
the shoaling corn
âeyeblink bolt
falcon stoopâ
epiglottal jukeâ
and crane
to shuck
the throated
husk.
And now the heronâ
minnow necked
in a pelican
mawâ
begins
to hump
and thrust
its prim
bobbed
camel walk â¦
homing 'cross
the blood-dimmed
dusk of
lust.
Drumbeat galley,
gullet of oar-song,
draw and scull and
featherstroke home
from the weary warsâ
Row! row for
the foaming
shore!
Thrum the drumhead
gourdâHum that anthem
Sound that triton hornâ
Thumb and Cock
the apoplectic
mushroom capâ
Uncork the vial
of tantric stormâ
To the sinnerâsuccour!
the sot, liquor
the fasted, supâ
Ship!
the last
long gleaming
oar in its salted lock
of gushing
spawning
salmon
roeâ
now Dock!â
with a Venus suck,
a sparrow swallow,
veined and bitted,
smooth as spittle,
lithe as lickingâ
TEOCUALO
Don is eaten.