Janaka Stucky: From 'Ascend Ascend,' a work in progress, with a note by the author

[Excerpted from Janaka Stucky’s forthcoming book, Ascend Ascend (Third Man Books, April 2019). The accompanying portrait of the author is by photographer Adrianne Mathiowetz.]

 

Blessed is the lotus

The day’s bleeding wound

 

Blessed are the spiders their alphabet

Twenty six stones my corpse is dancing

 

Blessed are the worms the maggots

Sexless and probing like tongues

 

Through the rotting soil

 

Blessed is the loam

 

Blessed is the loam the darkness

Mushrooms blooming teeth pushing

 

Through the earth’s black and putrid gums

 

Blessed is the Maw

The Great Maw the mouth the gnashing

Of continental shores

 

Blessed are the stones the rocks

The island all the world a promontory scab

Hardening around the earth’s myriad

Molten wounds

 

Blessed is the blood the bile ascending

The gross moss of shapeless years forming

 

On the eyeless trunks of trees

 

Blessed are the snakes the dragons

Breathing the giants eating each dumb

Beast our mothers our fathers filled with blood

 

Blessed are the black cricket’s legs singing

Furiously until the whole lake is on fire

 

Blessed is the fire

Blessed is the lake

Blessed are the cricket’s black legs

 

Blessed is the trembling nerve of now

The great topaz hurtling through

Galactic dark

 

Blessed is the dark the knotted roots

Of the first tree the fearful serpent

Uncoiling still as even the first

Stone turns to dust

 

Blessed is our fear

The Great Retching which rips us

Wide eyed hairy and blood spattered

Terribly laughing up from the mud

 

Blessed is the transfiguration of terror that wakens

The crimson thread within

 

Blessed is our weaving and braiding

Our crawling

 

Blessed is our climb

 

Blessed are we who flop from mud

To soil to grass to trees

 

Blessed are our lungs our hands

 

Blessed is the transmutation of air

And fruit and meat to spirit

 

Blessed are the bees

Blessed is their hive returning

 

Through each flaw of rain revealing

The heirophany of nectar

In the fresh light of the cloud’s empty womb

 

Blessed is our moaning and shitting

Our walking on quivering feet

 

Blessed is our walking and running

Our speaking each day our dying

 

Our struggle toward freedom our dying

Blessed is the fight for freedom

Even more than to be free

 

Blessed is our life

Blessed is our instrument responding

With purity to the collapsing

Sigh of the world

 

Blessed is our cry

Our cry our radiant repeating

 

The gleaming cinder

 

Like honey like wax like roses

The world vanishing and nothing

But us remaining beneath the abyss

Of god singing

 

I am the one that is not

 

And when the cry comes to no longer

Be the vessel the cry comes

Not from your mouth

Alone it is not you talking

 

It is ancestors of ancestors speaking with centuries

Upon centuries of mouths it is

Not you alone desiring it is

 

A galaxy of descendants desiring

Down the long fathomless

Pillar of your infinite heart

 

For between the void and the abyss

You alone struggle and are imperiled

 

And in your small earthen chest

One thing alone struggles and is imperiled

 

And when the cry comes

The cry comes in the cryptic tongue

 

To pass beyond my body bastion

Of sugar and bone

 

My body

Monstrously shining above

Black lichen rivers

 

Its curse like a star of blood erupting

From my throat

 

A promise roaring

Jackals howling

Awful and grim

 

My body my body

Lust magnificent

Views of Byzantium

Crucified awake in me

In me among

 

My body idle and brutal

Let light thunder

The first to adore

 

My body my ghost

My retinue of ghouls

 

Profane and dancing

Dizzy drunk and shrieking

Through a phantasmagoria of stars

 

My body exquisite

Thighs streaming with blood

 

My body hungry and gaping

Threaded with hands

 

My body my tongue distended

And dangling amid corpses

And noncorpses

Gun-gun drone the bees

 

My body my mouth

My penetrated mouth singing

Through the honeycomb locked in its jaws

 

My penetrated body

Levitating weightless

Rotted by this leprous alien song

 

I am penetrated

I am penetrated

I am pierced

 

My body my elephant my chariot

I am pierced

 

I am penetrated by men

 

I am penetrated by insects plants and beasts

The ecstatic march of flesh

 

I am penetrated by birds by stones

And the wind’s twisted shell

 

I am penetrated by seas and fires

By colors by wings

By horns by claws

 

By constellations

Butterlfies

 

I am penetrated

By great hemlocks blackening

The moonless sky

I am penetrated

 

By water by dreams

By lightning cracks in mute night

 

By night by night thick as death

It must be death

 

I am penetrated by death and cannot see

 

And beneath the night sky the universe

Of every eye judging acutely

With their small fires

 

Igniting to the orchard within

Me the path of names

 

Every word along the way

Lit like a flame upon

The wick of its origin

 

I kiss each name and make

For it a temple on my tongue I name

 

A stone I name an insect I name

An idea dancing across

A dust mote’s horizonless stage

 

I name a nightmare

Ecstasy

 

I name sleep

A fertile wall of storms

 

I name the air choked

With a blizzard of blossoms

White origin of apples

Buzzing on the wild threadless sun

 

I name the eye of the earth blinking in my blood

A phenomena of swarms

 

I name the hour black lightning

And its children golden sheaves of fire

 

Burning Lanka to the ground

 

I name this fever a flood like

A harras of feral horses breaking

On the blackened plain

 

And the trembling shale of stardust is its name

Red java flower is its name

 

The sky lit by heaping nectar

Is its name

 

The cloud whose throne is a corpse

Is its name

 

Dwell in its presence in dread

Is its name

 

Reflect on the root from which you were hewn

Is its name

 

An act without knowledge is nothing

Is its name

 

The seven heavens of chaos

Is its name

 

Vilon is its name

Raki’a is its name

Shehakim is its name

Zevul is its name

Ma’on is its name

Makhun is its name

Aravot is its name

 

A book like the hum of a severed head

Is its name

 

The firmament scattered like a riddle

Is its name

 

The millstone grinding bright miracle of wheat

Is its name

 

A silver bridge of the dead returning to their infinite numinous source

Is its name

 

A choir of thousands terrifying slow and rising

From a single mouth is its name

 

Scorched by the awestruck jism of a new element

Is its name

 

Amen amen nezah selah is its name

 

There is a precise instant when the world

Is marvelous

 

Now

Is its name

I hear its cry

 

I hear its cry

Lacerated by a paradise of sadness

 

Devoured by brutes

 

I hear its cry

Ashen with the incandescent

Dust of rubies

 

I hear its cry I rise

Weeping

 

A moth emerging

From the innocence of limbo

Beneath the green bowers

 

I hear its cry

Dissolving in a golden beam

 

I invent new beasts

New flowers new stars

New men new holes

Pool of Bethesda

New flesh new tongues

New purity O purity

This vision of purity

Erect for the brief bliss of the void

 

With their pestilential breath abating

I leave the hazel copse

 

I depart through nameless

Numberless years

 

Climb the cosmic mountain

Parapets of jasper shining

Above the waning cypress

Wading through thickets of mallow

I approach the navel of the earth

 

From the trunk of a gum tree

I fashion the sacred pole

 

Anoint it and climb

Belligerently ascend

And climb

Further still

I climb

And disappear

Into the sky

 

[Author’s Note: Ascend Ascend was written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals, while secluded in the tower of a one-hundred-year-old church. It is rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of merkabah literature, documenting an ascent up the kabbalistic sefirot to witness the chariot of god. My own attempt at this was initially unplanned and spontaneous; the first experience without agenda or tied to any tradition. What I saw could have been a UFO, a palace of Mayan gods, or Terence McKenna’s “machine elves” just as easily as it could have been Ezekiel’s vision. However, after talking with some fellow practitioners I felt that my experience — and any future attempt to document it — resonated most in the kabbalistic tradition. So I secluded myself and went into retreat. … While the majority of canonical merkabah literature is fairly dry and legal — composed of prose focused primarily on preparations for the journey while finally demurring to describe the experience itself — Ascend Ascend uses poetry to touch the ineffable. This larger work is therefore a kind of poetics of ascent, a long poem documenting the ecstatic destruction of the self through its union with the divine.]