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"Yoni Doves." Pooler Jones says the phrase with succulence. His lips caress the sounds as if they were vanilla or molasses. Yoni Doves depict the "cliterophalic presence of god herself." Pooler has been telling us of a Nunnery he used to frequent and how they made the most perfect dildos of both stone and wood. At Embrun, in the Alps, they had, as a relic, the phallus of St. Foutin. Brides and barren women would pour wine over the head of the dick and collect it in a dish and leave it to sour. As the "Saint Vinaigre," the liquid was used "for a purpose which is only obscurely hinted at." In many Christian Priapic rituals women would kiss the head of a sculpted phallus, or lay naked on such an object, or they simply sat on it. When this became morally dangerous as western minds moved from allegory to descriptive science the practice evolved to the women sitting naked on a stone. In southern France it was a custom for a bride to first "deposit the robe of her virginity on the altar of St. Foutin" - to be ceremonially deflowered by a Holy Phallus. None of these things, Pooler points out, would be a surprise to a culture like India, where the Yoni and the Lingam have been worshipped and used in like manners for more than a few thousand years. Christians have forgotten these things because they had to for their abstractions to survive. There are problems in the movement from the Profane to the Sacred and then back again. Western man has forgotten, at his peril, the metaphors of his antiquity. When the Masks of God are frozen in the Sacred they lose their roots, their growing ground, and then slowly dissipate in the rarefied air.
So it took about 6 months for the mission called: Fallen Warriors. That is, from the harvesting of the fallen Djed Pillar to its Resurrection on the village green. Slag climbed the pole for the last time to do two things: Crown the Djed with its Feathery Corona, and to thread the pole so it could display a flag.
We raised our Pillar in the fall of 2001 against the backdrop of the felling of the Twin Towers in New York. The Mission Fallen Warriors had nothing to do with that tragedy but by the time our mission was over those victims - and the ones to come - became included in the general rubric of the term.
We call this Spike Fallen Warriors because both the term and the mission are metaphors like the Djed Pole itself - metaphors fat with possible meanings. You are right to read into it Military meanings ripe with heroes and selfless actions. But if you do, be aware that the Spike celebrates ALL Fallen Warriors - including those of our enemies. And you are right to see it as a memorial to those from any calling who, facing adversity, fall but then get up. And you are right to read into it an I-Ching translation where the warriors concerned are seasonal flowers or broken vows. Kenny La Roche offers Fallen Warriors as a kind of mood ring where the viewer is free to see and feel whatever it takes to raise the Fallen Warriors within each of us. So Fallen Warriors celebrates fertility, resurrection, rehabilitation, and unabashed foolishness - along with the reminder that all these things at one time were one and that modern man lives in a dangerous time where our cultural amnesia has scraped our souls to a nub.
