For Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Again, the fission of self. Who are the changing speakers? Recollection of the experience of sense impressions, remembering the tree, makes the many selves unravel and project outward and carry on dialogue.

The true ego, the source of all knowledge and inspiration, is veiled by a taunting double. The poet sees directly into the world of pure ideas, the non-material, but the beings and thoughts there are transformed by her dark self. Her fear of death is laid out before her. The "voice of nothing", true oblivion, greets her healthy curiosity about death.

Lovelessness reigns. Most persons could not endure this vision, but the poet has consciously chosen to cross the threshold and meet the Guardian.

At night, the darkness coiled inside her unwinds and stands before her as an objective reality. Sleep is the precursor, the prototype of death-our daily practice of dying where most of us benefit by the oblivion and rebirth. But the poet moves consciously into a sleep where terror balances the ecstatic communication with the Muses.

Her consciousness is not anchored to a fixed point. In this quasi sleep state, she does not feel like an ego wrapped in a body, but senses that all outer events constitute her self. The object-subject dichotomy does not exist in this state of being which tolerates no bystanders. The tremendous passions that flow through her are experienced as the violent wind.

Like The Moon and the Yew Tree, this terrifying and "treey" vision is married to the moon. Her nightly encounter with the "Daddy Doppelganger" entwined about her central nervous system is "capped" by the atavistic moon consciousness. Her retention of tribal blood clairvoyance is a " bad possessor" because it suppresses her higher ego powers; however, it endows here with the visionary poetic ability. Her life quest was to wrest these creative powers from the darkness and take total control over them so she could offer them to the solar light of the true self. This she achieves when she rides the solar horse of love in Ariel.

Here is the doppelganger or the Lower Guardian of the Threshold blocking access to higher knowledge, appearing as a serpent entwined in the tree of the central nervous system. The vision of the poet confirms the teaching of the mystics.

Rudolf Steiner, in his Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul lecture cycle, on the meaning of the inverted tree and serpent:

Speaking of Arjuna's mighty vision of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita:

"That it is which we meet with in such a grand form in the Gita, which at the end of our last lecture we allowed to work upon our souls, and which Arjuna meets as his own being seen externally; seen without beginning and without end - outspread over all space. "

"If we observe this condition more clearly we come to a place in the Gita which, if we have already been amazed at the great and mighty contents of the Gita, must infinitely extend our admiration. We come to a passage which, to the man of the present day, must certainly appear incomprehensible; wherein Krishna reveals to Arjuna the nature of the Avayata-tree, of the Fig-tree, by telling him that in this tree the roots grow upwards and the branches downwards; where Krishna further says that the single leaves of this tree are the leaves of the Veda book, which, put together, yield the Veda knowledge. That is a singular passage in the Gita."

" What does it signify, this pointing to the great tree of Life, whose roots have an upward direction, and the branches a downward direction, and whose leaves give the contents of the Veda? We must transport ourselves back into the old knowledge, and try and understand how it worked. The man of today only has, so to say, his present knowledge, communicated to him through his physical organs. The old knowledge was acquired as we have just described, in the body which was still etheric, not that the whole man was etheric, but knowledge was acquired through the part of the etheric body which was within the physical body. Through this organism, through the organisation of the etheric body, the old knowledge was acquired. Just imagine vividly that you, when in the etheric body, could perceive by means of the serpent. "

"There was something then present in the world, which to the man of the present day is no longer there. Certainly the man of today can realise much of what surrounds him when he puts himself into relation with nature; but just think of him when he is observing the world: there is one thing he does not perceive, and that is his brain. No man can see his own brain when he is observing; neither can any man see his own spine. This impossibility ceases as soon as one observes with the etheric body. A new object then appears which one does not otherwise see - one perceives one's own nervous system. Certainly it does not appear as the present-day anatomist sees it. It does not appear as it does to such a man, it appears in such a way that one feels: “Yes! There thou art, in thy etheric nature.” One then looks upwards 'and sees how the nerves, which go through all the organs, are collected together up there in the brain. That produces the feeling: “That is a tree of which the roots go upwards, and the branches stretch down into all the members.”

The tree is not felt as being of the same small size as we are inside our skin: it is felt as being a mighty cosmic tree. The roots stretch far out into the distances of space and the branches extend downwards. One feels oneself to be a serpent, and one sees one's nervous system objectified, one feels that it is like a tree which sends its roots far out into the distance of space and the branches of which go downwards.

/

"Remember what I have said in former lectures, that man is, in a sense, an inverted plant. All that you have learnt must be recalled and put together, in order to understand such a thing as this wonderful passage in the Bhagavad Gita. We are then astonished at the old wisdom which must today, by means of new methods, be called forth from the depths of occultism. We then experience what this tree brings to light. We experience in its leaves that which grows upon it; the Veda knowledge, which streams in on us from without. The wonderful picture of the Gita stands out clearly before us: the tree with its roots going upwards, and its branches going downwards, with its leaves full of knowledge, and man himself as the serpent round the tree. "

By Sylvia Plath from her Collected Works

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

The poet steps out at night and immediately the exterior objects of the world are transformed by projections from her inner being, the trees are the black thoughts of her mind and the light is the cold light of her mind. She achieves consciously the objective visions of inner self and feels akin to a creator God.

But again, the doppelganger or the Guardian of the Threshold blocks her further entry into the spiritual worlds. Her overwhelming vision of self prevents her from seeing ".. where there is to get to." The dark tree topped by the mother moon reminds her of the great fall and absorbs all spiritual light.

The vision of the inner tree capped by moon consciousness is also a dying remnant of the old clairvoyance which contrasts with the Sun of Ariel.

In light of Steiner's description of the Avayata-tree, it is interesting to consider the following passage from the New Testament book of Matthew:

18 Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. 19 And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. 20 And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away! 21 Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. 22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. (Matthew21:19-21)

The Roots of the Fig Tree