[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]R[/dropcap]egardless of the imagination-bereft assertions of crackpot realists, Words, Phrases, and Sentences are more than empty verbal constructs, antithetical to purpose and action.
They are living things: the progeny of the union of the image-fecund soul of earth and sea and the Holy Spirit’s lambent, inhuman illuminations. We know them as the dance of affinities attendant to the mating rituals of Eros and Logos — the Word and Flesh enjoined and made one.
As is the nature of love, the process is painful. Within each and every eternal moment, in order to enable human consciousness to remain in place, this metaphor must play out within the psyche: The brutal, life-negating Titan of the sky, Uranus, must be castrated by his son Kronos (the embodiment of Order, Limits, and Time) and, by the act, creating Aphrodite (Love and Beauty).
Beauty and Love are formed from the transubstantiated, bloody mass of Uranus’ severed member that rises from the depths of the sea in the form of the goddess. Because immortals, as a rule, are incapable of evincing empathy, the emasculating wound suffered by Uranus allows for the introduction of the limits of mortal life into the world; thereby, the Titan’s wound is transformed into a womb bearing beauty.
By means of the process, the psyche has found a remedy for the misery-inflicting, life-negating quality known as dickishness.
Find solace in the knowledge that poets are out there now: wounded by beauty; indentured to logos. And that, even when we are exploring our present day wilderness of alienation, poets are laboring to limn a psychical map of its terrain of terror and beauty. All who live pass through this soul-plangent landscape.
Know this: It is an illusion that you have ever been alone.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
