Moly

by Peter Fortunato

Peter Fortunato lived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, from 2005 – 2009. There, he taught writing at Weill Cornell Medical College, including a seminar on literature and psychology. The following is an excerpt from a memoir he’s writing about his often magical times in the Middle East.

1.
From my journal:
I’ve been anxious about a brown blotch that appeared on the left side of my nose after a day of too much sun in Oman.

(Oman – ah! Mary and I splurged for three nights at the Al Bustan Palace, a resort paradise of palm trees and pools and volcanic stone outcroppings on a cove of the Arabian Sea. Oman – oh! I hiked away alone into the broiling black hills to meditate, the first time in the Arabian desert I had ever been completely solo, my whereabouts unknown. Oman: like “old Arabia,” a sultanate whose history reaches back hundreds of years to the frankincense trade with India and Africa, to caravan routes old as those the magi traveled on their way to Bethlehem.)

Meanwhile, back in noisy, dusty, Doha-under-construction, I am feeling poorly, and besides my fears about skin cancer, suffering for the past two days with a sinus headache. “Winter” is over, and it’s now terribly hot and dry, the relentless sun scorching from the moment it rises. The semester is ending, there’s a lot to do at school, but there was this plum after a hard day at work yesterday: an art show opening at the VCU campus next door to us in Education City. The artist was visiting from New York, a Latin American woman, Ms. L, with whom Mary and I hit it off immediately, all of us feeling that if we’d only met back home we could strike up a real friendship. Alas, she is leaving Doha tomorrow, and we’ll probably never see each other again. Transient place, liminal place, this desert crossroads where people arrive from all over the world and frequently leave before you can get to know them.

All of the happy socializing at L’s opening smoothed over my post-holiday blues, but must every garden have a serpent? I’m trying to keep a sense of sobriety about that splotch on my face: maybe I’ll have to join the melanoma club. Okay. If that’s the case I’ll do it, whether I like it or not. *

Awoke this morning at around 4:00 am from a sequence of dreams that began in the company of the Italian actor Roberto Benigni, one of my favorites. It was as if I had entered his universe, his commedia happening at hyper-speed. I was traveling with him from one dream site to another, and I was reading a book on botany as I went, and I found between the pages the pressed leaves of an actual plant.

Then I was at a public event with people I didn’t know, but it was a happy happening, like L’s opening the other night. Suddenly, a tall, thin guy, a long-hair who reminded me of a carpenter I worked with in California years ago, a guy from Binghamton, whose tool box I copied to build my own – that guy with the whacked out jokes, that fool who tried to rob a grocery store and got himself arrested – he was there. At the buffet he’s munching on something that looks like a celery heart. I ask for a taste. He has a whole clump of them in his hand, but instead of giving me one of those, he gives me a bite of what he’s eating. Its texture is vaguely reminiscent of fennel, but it doesn’t taste like fennel or anything else I’ve ever eaten.

In next moment, a woman comes up behind me: I hear her voice and then she literally has her hands all over me. Without turning around, as if we’re playing a game, I ask, “Is this L?” She laughs and says, “I’m not L. But you can call me whatever you like.” She continues moving her hands on my body, and it’s the way mothers will sometimes play with their young children, asking, “What’s this? What’s this? What’s this?” I’m answering, “My hand. My shoulder. My nose. ” She’s full of mirth and laughter and she goes: “No hand. No shoulder. No nose.” I’m repeating these words, the words of the Heart Sutra, “no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind – nor what the mind takes hold of” as I awaken.

The Heart Sutra: the essence teaching on the
Wisdom Gone Beyond all dualities. Sometimes
personified as the goddess Prajnaparamita.

2.
In the middle of my life, not exactly lost in a dark wood as was Dante at the outset of his Divina Commedia, nor driven so much to the types of compulsive behavior that typify a midlife crises, but yes, in the middle of my life, alone in a very foreign land, my wife teaching here only for this one semester and just about to leave, I dwell on a manifesto of the poet Ezra Pound, written when he was merely 26, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.” In it, Pound sought to identify certain principles of art pertaining to the New and the Modern as understood in the light of the Classical. And in an early book, The Spirit of Romance, he was already outlining the ideas with which he would seek to revolutionize modern poetry and collecting “the palette of colors” necessary for his epic poem, The Cantos.

I have since I first agreed to come here, choosen to think of my Doha days “in the spirit of romance”; that is, as an adventure -- even though tedium might be the most familiar challenge posed to me in this car-congested, shiny city rising in the desert. I try to reach across the culture barriers that separate the many social classes, and though I identify with the scads of guest workers who are actually building the place, I am more privileged than they, of course. They know the difference: I’m here to teach future doctors, I’m well rewarded, and within limits, quite free.

Being in an utterly foreign culture, I dream often about my youth and about friends far away. I reread Pound, my old teacher, and interestingly I find myself thinking about my Italian born father: uneducated, he spoke almost no English when he jumped ship and arrived in America. He was, however, a magician whose close-up work almost landed him on the Ed Sullivan show. Out of Pound’s ocean of ideas, these thoughts leap, flashing before my eyes: “The artist seeks out luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment. His work remains the permanent basis of psychology and metaphysics. . . I am more interested in life than in any part of it.”

Far from Ithaca, I strive to stay on track: autobiographical magic I once called my writing, my way to self-knowledge. “The art is transformation,” I wrote in a poem dedicated to my father. Dead now dozens of years, he was a conjuror, restaurateur, womanizer – a charmer who, in the middle of his life, abandoned my mother and me. I have so many things I wish I could tell him.

3.
In the Egyptian story, the scattered limbs of murdered Osiris are gathered together and magically reconstituted into a living man by his wife, Isis. A fish had eaten the male member when it was tossed into the Nile by his wicked brother Set, and so Isis must substitute a piece of wood -- a nice touch!

Metaphorically speaking, the absence of the phallus and in its subsequent restoration symbolize the self-renewing power of the Divine. Out of the Void, something new always arises, and in this story it is distinctly due to feminine magic. Thanks to Isis, Osiris becomes a god of resurrection and immortality. Similarly, in Hindu mythology, the relationship between the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine is explicitly represented by the erect penis, or lingam, of Shiva in conjunction with the vulva, or yoni, of Shakti. As Kali, the goddess kills Shiva during their divine copulation, beheading him, before he returns to life.

The yoni alone might be worshipped or the lingam, since each is in itself a symbol for that which is beyond duality. So too, the ancient Greeks and Romans erected stylized effigies of the male member (the herm) to invoke the blessings of the companionable god Hermes. Among the Egyptians, the ithyphallic Min had attributes similar to those of Osiris: fertility and prosperity. His erection issues from a point at the height of his navel, perhaps meant to indicate that he is a son of the goddess as well as her lover. Whatever their forms, whether depicted in ecstatic union or not, these primordial gods and goddesses unify opposites such as male and female, blind lust and discernment, impermanent flesh and immortal spirit. *

“I am more interested in life than in any part of it,” Pound says, pointing to one difference between poets and academic specialists. For the poet, the part is perceived in relation to the whole: “the luminous detail,” Pound calls it, because the image, the symbol, the synecdoche speak to the unconscious immediately without having first to answer to the intellect. (This, by the way, is the basis for sympathetic magic.) I might call this “Feminine” thinking, which recognizes that all parts have a role in the totality of an experience and can stand for the whole. “Masculine” thinking might then develop a critical analysis to deepen our understanding of how the parts work to comprise the entirety. Importantly, the further you go with your thinking in either direction, the more necessary is the compensating power of the other in order to maintain a balanced perspective.
The dashing young Ezra Pound with whom I was so impressed when I first read him in college was a self-styled troubadour and aesthete, a translator and editor and publisher, a free-lance literary critic who succeeded in changing the world of letters. He might well have thought of himself as a magician, given his lofty ambition and all of the goals he reached. However, during midlife he seems to have lost his way, at least partly as a result of obsessions beyond the purely artistic. While living in Italy, Pound became a propagandist for the dictator Mussolini and ended up raving against the Jews as well as the Allied powers during World War II. There are many passages of extraordinary beauty throughout The Cantos, especially in the early books and the very late ones, but when he begins weaving into his epic his disturbed ruminations on history, governance, banking, and war, a reader is likely to become lost or frustrated or disgusted with him.

Pound himself seems to have fragmented under the strain of composition, like a magician fallen victim to his own over reaching powers. As The Cantos – “the songs” -- become increasingly preoccupied with history, political science and usury, their music is choked off; their lights dim and their enchantment fades. This speaks to the want of the quality I associate with the Feminine: an harmonious acceptance of the world as it is, in contradistinction to Masculine dissection and the wish to manipulate things. Bearing in mind the principle of enantiodromia (the compensatory activity that constellates the opposite of a natural phenomenon, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw and the psychologist C. G. Jung later expanded upon) we might speculate that Pound’s madness was a result of his excessive efforts “to make sense” out of so many disparate stimuli.

Still, critics like Hugh Kenner have argued that the entire Cantos is of inestimable value precisely because it includes the evidence of its creator’s psychic disintegration and then his late artistic resurrection: after Pound’s years of near silence during his imprisonment in a US mental hospital, he returned to Italy and completed his book. For these reasons, The Cantos can be seen as authentic to the circumstances not only of its author-protagonist, but also of his entire culture, which was so terribly fragmented by World War II. A Modern epic, it can be said that it does indeed “make new” the Classical genre -- which is what the poem explicitly sets out to do, commencing with its magnificent, opening allusion to Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey. *

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

When I first heard this music, I was twenty years old, searching for teachers and spiritual fathers, and soon I set sail to follow Pound as he himself had followed masters of poetic craft such as Homer and Dante. “Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.” Yes, exactly: the witch goddess Circe is both Pound’s muse and the one whose magic supplies Odysseus and his crew with a ship – a craft -- to continue their journey. As in Homer, when Pound’s hero leaves Circe’s island, he first visits the underworld to find his bearings: “The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place/ Aforesaid by Circe.” This is a frightening task – but necromancy and mediumship are fundamental to both poetry and magic. Odysseus consults with the shade of the seer Tiresias and receives a dismaying prophecy about the end of his travails. As well, besides the dead heroes of the Trojan War, his comrades, he encounters among the shades his mother who has died since he set off years earlier for Troy. This is one of the most moving episodes of The Odyssey; however, Pound’s project is not simply to retranslate it, but to go forth from this specific scene, sacred to Western literature.
*
Book 10 of The Odyssey famously includes the story of how Circe transforms Odysseus’ crewmates – famished, lustful, ordinary men -- into swine. Their captain, however, is safeguarded against her sorcery because he eats the plant moly from the hands of Hermes. Furthermore, the god counsels him to show Circe his sword when she attempts to ensnare him, and even to threaten her with death if need be; Hermes prophesies that once Circe has acknowledged that Odysseus is the hero who was foretold to her, he will share her divine bed and seal his triumph. He does -- and furthermore Circe grants his request that his men be released from their enchantment. For an entire year they all enjoy the generosity of the goddess before growing homesick and setting out once more for Ithaca in the craft she provides.


But what is moly whose magic is so potent
that once eaten the charms of a goddess
can be resisted? Homer (as translated by
Butcher and Lang) says:
‘”It was black at the root,
but the flower was like to milk.

‘Moly,’ the gods call it, but it is hard for mortal men to dig, howbeit with the gods all things are possible.” On one level moly is an actual plant that some researchers have identified as a type of wild rue, an herb used for medicinal purposes that is also regarded as a prophylactic against evil; others say that moly is a wild garlic, also medicinal, also considered magical in the Mediterranean region. Beyond these botanical speculations it is not possible to say exactly what plant Homer had in mind, but that isn’t necessary in order to grasp moly’s significance: it is a gift from the gods that makes possible a correct relationship with them. It maintains harmony. It is holy.
After eating the herb, Odysseus can join brute desire with a sense of proportion. In other words, with moly’s help, he can see that Circe is indeed a goddess, very powerful, not evil, albeit dangerous to mortals who don’t possess the gift conferred by Hermes. From a psychological perspective, moly is a source of non-rational knowing; it is magical, like Hermes himself, who mediates between spiritual and human realms. This is why Hermes is a god of both magicians and poets, as well as of psychologists, as Jung understood. This recognition also opens a way to think about the meaning of craft as it relates to the making of art or other forms of magic. The correct relationship among parts is their harmony, their sense of proportion and beauty, the “truth” that they strive after.

4.
In Doha I read The Cantos in its entirety for the first time: late afternoons in my office at WCMC-Q, with soft music streaming from my computer, the lights low, the hallways quiet, my feet up on my desk -- just as I thought a professor should be free to do. I thought about Pound and his madness, and I thought about my own father, another sort of magician whose illusions also subsumed him.

Near the end of Pound’s life, after his mental breakdown, after his years of incarceration, late in his life when he had grown almost completely silent, he would admit that he had mistaken a symptom for a cause, that he had lost his “focus,” and that avarice was the underlying problem he ought to have addressed, rather than the usury he identified with the Jews. He never apologized publicly for his anti-Semitic, anti-Ally rants (although Allen Ginsberg tells a moving story of a private conversation with the old man), and for some readers until this day his behavior is unforgivable, his madness no excuse, his ravings precluding all contrary claims to greatness.

I believe that I might go mad myself were I to continue pondering humanity’s boundless stupidity, greed and anger. The Buddha taught that rebirth in the world of suffering is inevitable unless these “afflictions” are remedied, and he taught the Eight Fold Noble Path as a means to do so. The ultimate antidote is called Highest Perfect Wisdom, Prajnaparamita, which in the West is called Gnosis. The Buddha said he had given his students a path to liberation, but that they must walk it themselves. This is a powerful statement coming from the compassionate, awakened One, a human being like us and not a god. However much any of us would wish to compel others to see by our lights, they cannot be made to do so. As for Ezra Pound, he seems at last to have accepted that life is not so symmetrical as a work of art might be, but that rather, life is illuminated according to its own principles, and not the will of the artist.
We are capable of amazing rationalizations for our obsessiveness, as well as many clever defenses against the threats we believe that others pose to us. Throughout his life, my errant father never thought that he had set out to do me or my mother harm. I can accept his reasoning, flawed though it proved: for all his life he saw himself as a survivor, a resourceful wayfarer whose mother had died when he was a child and whose authoritarian father knew him only at a distance among six other sons. I see now how poorly prepared he was for parenting me, and I forgive him.

5.
From my journal:
Mary has gone from Qatar to deliver a paper in England, and then she will return to Ithaca, her term in Doha having expired. I have signed a three year renewal of my contract and grieve her departure and wonder how I will resume my life here next Fall without her.
Have I always been so anxious? I think I have inherited my kindly mother’s worried stomach as well as my wily father’s volatility.
And then there’s “the black spot,” as I’ve been calling this thing on the right side of my nose. I have consulted by telephone with my friend, the lovely Dr. O. She has referred me to a dermatologist at a local private clinic. On the phone with O, I made little of my concerns and soon found myself flirting, as in the old days before Mary first arrived in Doha. Then I was planning with O when we could get together before we each leave for the summer. How quickly I am back in familiar territory! Have I had a sufficient dose of moly?
*
I find the clinic in one of Doha’s upscale neighborhoods. I am expected and immediately escorted to an exam room by a demure nurse in white uniform, hijab and shayla. A short while later the doctor arrives and I am stunned by her appearance. She must be in her thirties, white-coated, her head uncovered, dark ringlets pulled back neatly by tortoise shell combs. I deduce she might be of Persian heritage, like Dr. O. (Or maybe Lebanese? Palestinian? I never asked.) Dr. Z introduces herself with an American accent and a courteous handshake. (How strange to be touched by an unknown woman, even under professional circumstances, in Qatar!) She is obviously happy to meet and chat with an American, and we converse amiably and openly about her education at Johns Hopkins, her former life in the U.S.A., her unhappy days in Doha. Her husband, an oncologist, has returned to States and she doesn’t know what their future together holds. Doha has worn her out, because, as for me and so many expats, life in Qatar can seem to be mostly about work.

Suddenly, I’m finding it difficult to continue our conversation, or even to look at her directly: her eyes are the bewitching eyes of the eastern Mediterranean that invariably ignite my heart with fantasy.

Is it unseemly for a married man of my age to believe in the limitless possibilities of love? I thrill to what the great poets tell us about the immortal gods and goddesses – those powers whom William Blake asserts “reside within the human breast.” And so, Dr. Freud, why should my fantasies be dismissed as “psychological compensations” for the limitations of my mortality? And, by the way, Dr. Jung, I know very well that my “imaginal” conceits are not my unique prerogative but are archetypal -- this doesn’t mean they aren’t as much mine as my flesh and blood pumping heart. With Walt Whitman, I celebrate my contradictions. My lust is a light in me, a shadow, too, and because of this, it gives depth to my experience.
At last our flirtation must cease and I become a patient for Dr. Z. to examine. She takes a step back. I tell her about my recent sojourn in Oman. With her bag of instruments at the ready, she asks me to be seated on the edge of her examination table. Then she picks up a magnifying lens to study the dark, dime-sized spot on the side of my nose. Dangling my legs from the edge of the high table where I sit, I stare ahead at our reflections in her office window. I am in a blue dress shirt, a blue and gold tie, pressed tan slacks and black shoes, my outfit de rigueur at conservative Weill Cornell. My graying hair is long, however, and I take special care in trimming my mustache and goatee. I am rather like my father in this respect: rather vain.

“This looks like burnt skin,” Dr. Z announces almost immediately. “Weird, though, that it’s just one spot. And perfectly round.” She pauses for a moment. “In the sun, all those hours, were you wearing eyeglasses to read?”

I think about that last afternoon on the grounds of the Al Bustan Palace, my reading lenses perched low on my nose. I remember the waters of the Arabian Sea lapping at the my feet and the bikini clad beauties lounging all about me. “I didn’t want it to end, and I lingered for hours with my book.”
She smiles at me, her warmth from a distance now. “Keep it moist with Vaseline or first aid cream, and it will probably peel off shortly. Keep your new skin protected.”

Peter Fortunato, MFA, CHT, is a poet
and painter, as well as a hypnotist
in private practice in Ithaca.
His web site is www.peterfortunato.wordpress.com

(Return to Metaphysical Times Home Page)