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Spagyric Red
Do the red disks on limestone: cave walls proclaim an abyss has been crossed?
That, unlike us, the other side is gender occult?
That's unlike our flesh, it can sustain our marks and send back into our bodies, as we hold our fingers to it, vibrations of the end penetrating us?
Surely they have a rapport with animal blood as it glistens and dries to earthworm-colored sinew, dries to juiceless matter—and surely to menstrual blood
In Mother Johanna of the Angles, it is surely a paleolithic gesture when the Mother Superior dashes her hand up her white robes then whirls to the stone nunnery wall, drawing her bloodied fingers down the wall before the alarmed exorcist's face
Might these disks be the first alchemy, the joining of body to cosmos, the finite reddening into the infinite?
O mole of me that wants to eat night, fanged desperation to sink into the outside and hold
Tonight the sky over Les Eyzies is peacock sapphire calamine baby blue cerulean, all the hollyhock and rose is below in black widow concentration as the limestone continues to discharge gas, in deathrow as in seedrow
Hades as a colobus satanas peering through the stork-hived footage
Hades wearing the colobus as Coatlicue wears my mother
As the wolf wears Little Red Riding Hood and the doctor in Nightwood wears a woman's gold wig, rouged and afloat in a bed littered with the garbage of the hunched, cat-eyed night
—or does "wearing" = “treading?”
As Hades treads this "mutilated Satan," as we are fecundated rudely in order to be grasped by abyss as inherent form
The mockery of copulation, vultures screwing around with the remains of our mother Kali-Ma, who takes the terror of the infinite night into her as she writhes on the hard decayed phallus every man at least once feels between his eyes!
[Hotel Cro-Magnon,
3 June 1987]
"Spagyric Red" is based on a visit to Le Combel, a section of the upper Paleolithic decorated cave of Pech-Merle in the French Lot region. It has many red disks rubbed on the walls using red ochre at about 15,000 BCE, some of the earliest image-making known, "Spagyric" is an alchemical term I am borrowing to get at the twisting turmoil evoked by these disks, It means something like "the clash of whirling vortices that intersect and spill through each other generating the perpetual tide-change of inner turmoil that occupies the ‘inner space’ within dense materiality."
Clayton Eshleman is the author of eleven books of poetry, two books of prose, and ten books of translations. His most recent books are Under World Arrest (Black Sparrow, 1994) and Watchfiends & Rack Screams, a translation of works from the final period of Antonin Artaud (Exact Change, 1995). He continues to edit Sulfur, now in its 38th issue, at Eastern Michigan University, where he is a professor in the English Department.