Ouroboros

Osiris was born again as Ra, in The Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. The formless recycling which underlies every day translates easily into the electrical grid which connects the universe to itself and makes energy exchanges instantaneous, even across endless spaces. It is the ancient Norse dragon Jörmungandr which surrounds the world, as does the Biblical Leviathan, the Vedic Kundalini, alchemy’s mandala, and the recursive cybernetics of cognition theory, where a feedback loop reinvents data. The body replenishes itself like a tree, known as autopoesis, the self-maintaining chemistry of living metabolisms. Autopoesis should signify a self-writing poem, or poems written while driving.

The eukaryotic cell is the core of the human body, where an internal exchange of molecules maintains a structure which in turn gives rise to its own components, the way a surfer on a board shifts his balance on a wave. Waves and particles take turns being each other, as Cathy says.

The same regeneration fuses through me in the middle of the night, filling me with warmth, and with its concomitant ideas. It is the recycling channels of phloem and xylem in a tree that exchange energy between the soil and the sun to produce leaves and bark, the Gnostic duality of existence. It is the Jungian dawn state in which we give birth to ourselves in a waking dream: the eternal recurrence, Buddhism’s endless knot, the shrivatsa.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says:

"All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, “You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!” then you wanted all back ... For all joy wants—eternity."

He called it amor fati:

"one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, . . . but to love it."

The French physicist Henri Poincaré’s recurrence theorem states that certain dynamical systems, such as particles of gas in a sealed container, will return infinitely often to a motionless state of entropy, close to their original state. Thomas Pynchon applied the concept of entropy to his fiction. Financiers speak of reversion to the mean, wherein theories of wealth are ultimately controlled by logical values, the fundamentals of financial merit.

Like grains, which disappear into the earth and are reborn with the spring, Persephone was abducted into the earth, into hell, that distant chthonic land of myth, but allowed by her father Zeus to return in the spring, as the land had withered and died without her. She is the Queen of the Dead, whose secret rites of regeneration at Eleusis promise immortality to initiates.

Death and eternity are thus fused in an eternal loop, an ouroboros, a self-regenerating cell.

Poems, I always think, come out of an excess of life, out of a love for the world which cries out to be expressed somehow. It is an “immortal longing” which, like Persephone’s death, produces a compensatory explosion of life, the flowers that grow out of death, the hope of endlessness which any glance out to sea evokes. The eternity of the horizon, when you live on an island, is a constant role model for our emotions, as when Ulysses looks out across the Aegean in Godard’s film Contempt, to Georges Delerue’s musical still life, as timeless and motionless as the “Largo” from Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D.

As the music suggests, it’s the emotion behind the film, not the film itself. It’s the telling, not the story. An event happens, but its eternity lies in the story it creates and recreates with each new telling.

Sometimes poets write, not for lovers, but for love. They write from the ouroboros, the circular flow of self-replicating spirit, the phloem and xylem which is in everyone’s DNA.

In our own way, we are trees. In between the soil and the sun grows the human being. We are the channel of love. Death. The sea. La tendresse. La vengeance. Dans tout en magic en Francescope et en Technicolor.