The wily Minotaur, seeing a sputtering enigma approaching, pulled a
lever, shifting the tracks.
Foreskin and Bud found themselves in a roundhouse between
conception and absence.
They noticed that their headgear was hanging on a Guardian Ghost
boulder engraved with breasts snake-knotted across a pubis.
“A formidable barricade,” said Bud. “To reach paradise, we must learn
how to dance this design.”
The pubis part disappeared. Fingering his sub-incision, Bud played
“Dance of the Infidels.”
Foreskin joined in, twirling his penis making bullroarer sounds.
The Guardian Ghost boulder roared: “WHO ARE YOU TWO THE
SURROGATES OF?”
Bud looked at Foreskin. Foreskin looked at Bud.
“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” they said in unison.
Then they heard the Guardian Ghost laughing. “Life is a joyous thing,”
she chuckled, “with maggots at the center.”
⁂
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was first alerted to the tjurunga (or churinga, as it is also spelled) by Robert Duncan in his essay “Rites of Participation” (from The H.D. Book), which appeared in Caterpillar #1, 1967. Duncan quoted Geza Róheim (“The tjurunga, which symbolizes both the male and female genital organ, the primal scene and combined parent concept, the father and the mother, separation and reunion… represents both the path and the goal”), and then commented: “This tjurunga we begin to see not as the secret identity of the Aranda initiate but as our own Freudian identity, the conglomerate consciousness of the mind we share with Róheim… the simple tjurunga now appears to be no longer simple but the complex mobile that S. Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command saw as most embodying our contemporary experience: ‘the whole construction is aerial and hovering as the nest of an insect’—a suspended system, so contrived that ‘a draft of air or push of a hand will change the state of equilibrium and the interrelations of suspended elements… forming unpredictable, ever-changing constellations and so imparting to them the aspect of space-time.’”
Reading Barry Hill’s Broken Song / T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession brought back and refocused Duncan’s words. In Vol. 13 of The Collected Works, Jung writes: “Churingas may be boulders, or oblong stones artificially shaped and decorated, or oblong, flattened pieces of wood ornamented in the same way. They are used as cult instruments. The Australians and the Melanesians maintain that churingas come from the totem ancestor, that they are relics of his body or his activity, and are full of arunquiltha or mana. They are united with the ancestor’s soul and with the spirits of all those who afterwards possess them…In order to ‘charge’ them, they are buried among the graves so that they can soak up the mana of the dead.”
In my poem “The Tjurunga,” I propose a kind of complex mobile made up of the authors, mythological figures and acts, whose shifting combinations undermined and reoriented my life during my poetic apprenticeship in Kyoto in the early 1960s. At a remove now of some 45 years I see these forces also as a kind of GPS (global positioning system) constantly “recalculating” as they closed and opened door after door.
In the thick of breakthroughs often interpreted by my confused mind as obstructions in Kyoto, I was able to complete only one poem that struck me as true to my situation and destiny as a poet: “The Book of Yorunomado.” Thus I opened the poetry section of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader with this poem and closed this section with “The Tjurunga.”
With bookends in mind, I see these two poems as the “soulend” supports holding the rest of my poetry in place. Thinking back to Vallejo pointing at my gut in 1963 and indicating that I was to commit seppuku, I was struck by the following quotation from James Hillman’s Animal Presences: “The theological message of the Siva-Ganesha, father-son pattern can be summarized in this way: submit that you may be saved, be destroyed that you may be made whole. The sacrificial violence is not the tragic conclusion but the necessary beginning of a passage into a new order… the God who breaks you makes you; destruction and creating ultimately spring from the same source.”
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