a grape vine: #11

Jean Cocteau likes grapes. Likes
the thought of grapes, their
form in his mind somehow 

congruent with
salves, or the slavish
poetics he tallies: sacs;

blooming along the trellis
in leprous overabundance.
There are no grapes in Northeast
Ohio, at least not

last night, when walking the length
of Cooper Foster Park Road,
Sheffield to Lorain, I
saw a deer staring through live

mists of an empty field. It was
right across the street from where

my father's buried. A road there

can veer off into these stoned histories, and Jean
can't.
-L. LaCook. From, "Dirty Milk."

nameless: F. Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC., 1991. p.249. “when deprived of human communication, will not the individual be condemned to the existence of the Wild Man in the forests of Shennongjia, the Big Foot of America, of the Yeti of the Himalayas?" M. Lee. Introduction to Gao Xing jian, Soul Mountain. New York, 2000. p.ix.

pine tree: "A mysterious relationship seemed to connect the pine with the vine. It grows, so it was said, in warm earth, in those places where the vine prospered best also. It's resin was much used to conserve wine and refine it." W.F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth amd Cult. Bloomington, IN., 1965. pp.157-58

 

"can be gentle: P.J. Brown, http://www.belinus.co.uk/mythology/Dionysus.htm. 27 July 2002. "Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche---a blissful and terrible experience. Humanity, huddling behind the walls of its culture, believes it has escaped this experience, until it succeeds in letting loose another orgy of bloodshed." C.G. Jung, "Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process." In, J. Campbell, Editor, Spiritual Disciplines: Papers From the Eranos Yearbooks. Princeton, NJ., 1960. p.363.

language: "one reason why wolves and other predators sometimes indescriminately kill cows and sheep: domestic animals don't know how to signal back. They don't know the language; they can't assert their subjecthood...The result is a mute slaughter." A. Weston, Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism. Philadelphia, PA., 1994. p.57.n

Pine: The Pine is sacred to the goddess Diana, and to Cybele. Devotees of Dionysus wore pine tree foliage. It also served as a bridge for Siberian shamans between this world and Otherworld realms. "Nepalese shamans use song and drumming to reach a trance state in which they see a certain pine tree out in the forest. They then send other members of the village out to the location they saw, to cut down the tree, strip it of its branches (except for a few pieces of greenery at the top) and bring it back into the village. There it is placed upright in a hole." K. Kelly,"The World Tree in Classical Shamanism." http://www.shamaniccircles.org/2002oraclefolder/worldtree.html. "Ovid, by the way, says of the pine-tree that it is 'pleasing to the mother of the gods, because Cybalean Attis here put off his human form and stiffened into a tree." C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation. Princeton, NJ., 1976. p.425.

a parka: A.S. Milovsky, "Tubiakou's Spirit Flight." Natural History, July 1992.

the shaman stretches
the throat of a walrus
over his drum.
P. Stainer. From, "The Ice-Pilot Speaks"

it is not accidental: J. Turner, The Abstract Wild. Tucson, AZ, 1996. p.51. "what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others..." N. Abraham, "Notes on the phantom: a complement to Freud's metapsychology."

its host: The thyrsos, also spelled thyrsus, was one of the god's symbols. Basically a septer upon which ivy or grape vines were wound, it was topped with a large pine cone.