January 24, 2007 : Finding the Lumionous Amongst the Gore

It is a nightmare to begin a day pondering on the head of John the Baptist! a gruesome still life on a platter. What gave rise to such a fiction just outside the caesura of grace? In search of the luminous element. Once, long ago, in a hospital room a man of Greek Orthodox persuasion showed me this head dripping gore tattooed on his left forearm. We were saying prayers for his wife. The detached head was an icon for him of some spiritual power, an identity unretrievable for me, a representation of faith speaking into the face of worldly power.

Contemplation: a reverent and pious approach, the prelude to the poem;
Laughter: the eternal sea will never learn to laugh.

There is in Mark perhaps a little element of humorous derision, an insider’s wink, toward Herod Antipas whose step-daughter would never have been called upon to entertain his guests with the dance of seven veils, and a harkening back to the alluring and painted Jezebel Ahab’s queen, patron of the Astarte, womb of the universe, before whom Elijah stood as the prophets of Baal bloodied themselves and raved on, and who were later slain by the sons of this Elijah enthused with the Spirit of Yahweh: and God was in the still small voice. A contrast in styles.

John the hermit dressed in exomis vis-à-vis an orgy of excess. Who is remembered and honored this day, the king Herod or the hermit whose head the king could have, but whose spirit was still alive in that hospital room?

The sea raves humorless and indifferent, and still we must laugh in the face of the pretense of the powerful.