Mountain Climbers' Plutarch Brain Beheaded World

"Mountain Climbers Storm Spiritus Mundi at Earth Center" / Plutarch's Brain Beheaded World

There is a metaphor inside Yeats head where we get him to open his mouth. Inside the metaphor we walk the mind of bubble pops, that body of fairyland inside earth where branching visions lie. We do not know the landscapes. We measure maps. Some interiors, like Dante’s macro pic, are what we are.

Everybody wants to ride to that culture-wide inwendigkeit under sky. Be spiritually aware. Eat the ticket.

Talk about extremophiles! The "BODY IS A FAIRYLAND...the sleek surface of the teeth is a multiplicity of fairy caverns ...the surface of the hand resembles an arid deltic plain...the surface of the tongue, the taste buds can be seen as a garden of beings serving to taste and to guide the macro-being. A skin pore magnified several thousand times is seen as a naturally irregular meat cave inhabited by bacteria" (Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 145).

No camera measures these interiors so we rely on Dante to compare earth from his poor soul. Maybe we'll get Blake or Yeats to microscope the landscape in. Outside the compound fairyland: "Ego, Id, Oedipalism, Anima, replaced the fairy folk of the country in the confines of the city. Trolls, brownies, Leprechauns, pookas doff their country costumes for the abstractions of new folklore" (139). These horrors of the new folklore are the Bladder Wacks, Pismiths, Belchers, Orcs, Whopapops, Susans of the obese profane age: "sensual horror, pathos, sympathy, all conjoined in intellective adventure...the sensorium of Inferno has begun to constellate more imaginative and more real creatures and beings…The stairs become living movies...in Paradiso the eco-complexity becomes so intense with throngs and multitudes of the Divine that it flares into the feedback of an ultimate vision (142)."

Down to the Waist / Up to the Feet

But it is in the Infernal that the stairs of the ultimate vision go down. In part because the psyche giant profiles the greater, that is the human knowledge self-reflexed, self served. It eats the flesh as its reverse children eat Saturn. Let it pass. "Two travelers find the shaggy and gigantic Lucifer at the absolute centre of the Earth, embedded up to his waist in ice. The only way they can continue their journey is by climbing down his sides-there is plenty of hair to hold on by-and squeezing through the hole in the ice and so coming to his feet." They climb down its sides, "though it is down to his waist, it is up to his feet" (Inferno xxxiv, 70f: C. S. Lewis. The Discarded Image. 141-2).

Sometimes the stairs go up to where Saturn first ate in fear of his supplanting. Societies eat earth from ignorance and fear of doing. Eat the mountain, down a river, pour atmosphere in the sea. Movies predict that the giants of obesity, those manufactured imaginative bounds, will bulge the equator and force still more unseen metaversal flesh up into the belly of a whale. Scale a mile to an inch to compass worlds below. The epic world is closer to unseen than can be said. Munch down a mountain, pony up some sewage, drain an aquifer. It needs a depression deep enough to save. We have our counterparts in Homer. That pariah Noah is our bubble. This metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

Sometimes these things seem as big as they are, and as old. Plutarch says in On the Face of the Moon that "the stars revolve fixed like 'radiant eyes'110 in the countenance of the universe, the sun in the heart's capacity transmits and disperses out of himself heat and light as if it were blood and breath, and earth and sea 'naturally' serve the cosmos to the ends that bowels and bladder do an animal. The moon, situate between sun and earth as the liver or another of the soft p95viscera111 is between heart and bowels, transmits hither the warmth from above and sends upwards the exhalations from our region, refining them in herself by a kind of concoction and purification.112 (Loeb Classical Library, XII, 1957). The little world thus has the same organs as the big. How's that for pathetic fallacy?

Working back, working around, come down to Noah/Jonah cast into the fish in order to save the ship lest everyone drown. Jonah in the belly is a grave. The Ship is the World! Before he's cast up on south beach Noah Meets the Wilderness. That's what we do. Throw the outcasts into space in modern terms, put on them our sins, tie their hands and drive them to the deep beyond. We must manufacture a spaceship, some horse or donkey, a mule from sin. Anything to carry them. Send our sins into space! They threw them overboard in the past, but did not throw Paul to save because he saved them all (Acts 27). Cases are never the same. He is salvation, not pariah. How to tell pariah from savior? "It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with...PhDs" says David Orr (c. 1990). Too soon to talk of shells cast off by *autodactylmorphs, part salesman, part dinosaur, part invention. How wonderfully we void wilderness. "Science has conquered nature," the product of natural forces. Co2 buried before the age began, in air and under sea in metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.