The Outcast
Painting by Leo Spreksel
The doorway to archetypal consciousness is Death of the known. A less fearsome option is the Outcast invocation. Here is a poetic mirroring of the dance intelligence of this archetype.
The Outcast
is Body-worshipper
in a cosmos of
Body-transcendence
Body-biology
and countless Body-enslavements by
ideas and ideologies
spawned in the absence of the one Oracle
to whom the secret of Reality was revealed.
Her life-plan is encoded
in the bone, blood, marrow
of Body
birthed in womb’s fleshed expulsion
drenched in sensorial waters
expressed with electric release
to fertilise the soil from which
Body is whirled into being.
She dances alone
unshackled by communities and families
abandoned by progeny save for dance
birthed in the self-same waters
bloodied in the self-same urgency
of cosmic contractions hell-bent
on flinging fleshed expression
as Divine poetry.
Meanwhile
Body-less tribes abandon their karmic inheritance
deluded by meaning diatribes as Truth
divorced from the ancestry of bone architecture
and its soil-scented remembrance of ancient matter.
Even so
Her alchemy intimately beckons
through devotions to Body
revealed of a veiled dawning day
as She humbly lowers Her head
to kiss Her feet…
scatters wildflowers in Her hair
smears Earth’s moist arousal on Her skin
allows rivers to flow from her head
releases Body’s mother-tongue of dance
in secret rituals remembered only
when you cease to flee
that eternal Outcast waiting
in the curves of Body
to be met in womb-birthed dance
of flesh and smell and moistness
that is offspring of Body’s long inheritance
beyond my life and yours
my body and yours
perhaps from a 12,000-year-old fox
sculpted on Gobekli Tepe’s enigmatic Body-pillars.
Like Stonehenge, the Outcast is pregnant with silence
from which emerges a solitudinous dance
humbly worshipping Body
in ritual sensoriality that meets
the sensorial source of Reality
enwombed in an explosion of breath
flung like a warrior’s spear into Earth’s bowels
and tastes of soil and blood
and the undeniable Truth of blood-throb Reality
trembling in the Outcast’s dance.
-Padma Menon
Honoured to have Leo Spreksel's painting join this invocation!