Psychopomp

No pomp under these circumstances, not pumped up, but down played under gray monochrome fog: wrapped, embalmed, embezzled, embarrassed, and altogether all alone. No subject, no object, no prosody. Especially no verb, just verbiage, hoping for gerunds and finding whatever.

Are you with me? Are you against me? In embrace, leaning, or perhaps pragmatic paranoia sees psychopathic intent in the contact. Who knows? Who is there to know that is not lean and awash in the gray?

Knowing was for a different time and place. Knowing was for a world with edges and colors and multiple cultures. Knowing was from a whirled birthing of paradigms popping into play. Now even the after images of these aborted bubbles slink into the underworld gray, victim to pathetic psychopathic pomp gone amuck.

In the ancient days, there was guidance, pirate guide dancing across the River Styx, boat available at a price. The Psychopomp was ready, and he was not merely psycho pomp.

Dependent upon quantification and accumulation, we synchronize our watchings. Is psychopomp coming? Perhaps there can be an emerging of this "guide of souls." The psychopomp's duty is to escort the deceased to the afterlife. It has never been the work of the psychopomp to judge. The psychopomp only provides safe passage.

To where are we now passing?

Jung saw the psychopomp as the archetypal mediator between the conscious and the unconscious. But it seems to this pirate that there is no such free flowing watery route in this degenerate age. We have no designated driver, no one more alive to the ambiguity of the gray than the average colorless lush. The here is only former solidity and clarity, and the there is merely the longing for that. Imagination is virtually missing in the this and the that, here or there.

In the ancient days, when the gods were alive on the streets and mingling with mortals in acts of mutual creation, stories emerged with each breathing and each seeing. Faith itself was more alive than the objects of its inquiry. Worlds were born and died, dancing out of Styx crossings in ephemeral mini-moments too brief to concretize.

Do you remember how the Ginnungagap, that magical creative power filled space, came to be out of the meeting of the eternal ice and snow and the eternal heat and flame? In this Norse version of the big bang, Ginnungagap is the name of the seeming emptiness out of which the manifest universe emerges.

Where does the effulgence of the cosmogenic process rest now? What name can we name beyond our quantification of loss? What name can we name beyond our global battle of the hot over the cold? Will the heat cause our Styx to overflow its banks? Will the banks' erosion allow for another all destroying flood? Will the promissory note of the rainbow collapse into a lack of causes and conditions for this iridescent vision?

The drumbeats of shamans had formed bridges ridden to the ends of the earths. Now there are only armchair travelers too economically bereft or too afraid to travel in spontaneous worlds.

What constitutes safe passage?

The risk free, non-controversial, solid, and secure is stoppage, not passage. The safe is enshrined, safe deposit boxed, safe sexed, flowless, flawless, fearless accumulation. The more and more: mores lost and shriven.

The hoarding is hard to justify and harder to dissipate.

Passage demands impermanence. Expansion demands obliteration.

The great Norse god Odin cast his eye into the depths of a well in payment for a drink of its waters of wisdom. Perhaps at the well bottom was a pirate, lurking in wait, motivated only by love, bound only by lascivious holding of breath. Perhaps this pirate once died with an incurable forehead wound, a site ripe for the grafting of divinity's sacrifice. Where better for an eye to fall?

From such visionary merger might emerge soul guide anew, with hope of passage out of grays into fresh circumstance. After life not as life after, but as here and now, accumulation of afterbirth discarded.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes t o inspire profound mutiny in all those w ho care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, bu t emanating fr om within this shadow is hope that r eaders will f eel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e contact if you dare.