Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

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Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 437

by Aldous Huxley

Of the sun-like stage. And all the space between,

  Like the hot fringes of a summer sky,

  Is quick with trumpets, beats with the pulse of drums,

  Athwart whose sultry thunders rise and fall

  Flute fountains and the swallow flight of strings.

  Music, the revelation and marvellous lie!

  On the bright trestles tumblers, tamer of beasts,

  Dancers and clowns affirm their fury of life.

  “The World-Renowned Van Hogen Mogen in

  The Master Mystery of Modern Times”.

  He talks, he talks; more powerfully than even

  Music his quick words hammer on men’s minds.

  “Observe this hat, ladies and gentlemen;

  Empty, observe, empty as the universe

  Before the Head for which this Hat is made

  Was or could think. Empty, observe, observe.”

  The rabbit kicks; a bunch of paper flowers

  Blooms in the limelight; paper tape unrolls,

  Endless, a clue. “Ladies and gentlemen...”

  Sharp, sharp on malleable minds his words

  Hammer. The little Indian boy

  Enters the basket. Bright, an Ethiop’s sword

  Transfixes it and bleeding is withdrawn.

  Death draws and petrifies the watching faces.

  “Ladies and gentlemen”: the great Van Hogen Mogen

  Smiles and is kind. A puddle of dark blood

  Slowly expands. “The irremediable

  Has been and is no more.”

  Empty of all but blood, the basket gapes.

  “Arise!” he calls, and blows his horn. “Arise!”

  And bird-like from the highest gallery

  The little Indian answers.

  Shout upon shout, the hanging gardens reverberate.

  Happy because the irremediable is healed,

  Happy because they have seen the impossible,

  Because they are freed from the dull daily law,

  They shout, they shout. And great Van Hogen Mogen

  Modestly bows, graciously smiles. The band

  Confirms the lie with cymbals and bassoons,

  The curtain falls. How quickly the walls recede,

  How soon the petrified gargoyles re-become

  Women and men! who fill the warm thick air

  With rumour of their loves and discontents,

  Not suffering even great Hogen Mogen —

  Only begetter out of empty hats

  Of rose and rabbit, raiser from the dead

  To invade the sanctity of private life.

  The Six Aerial Sisters Polpetini

  Dive dangerously from trapeze to far

  Trapeze, like stars, and know not how to fall.

  For if they did and if, of his silver balls,

  Sclopis, the juggler, dropped but one - but one

  Of all the flying atoms which he builds

  With his quick throwing into a solid arch

  What panic then would shake the pale flower faces

  Blooming so tranquilly in their hanging beds!

  What a cold blast of fear! But patrons must not,

  And since they must not, cannot be alarmed.

  Hence Sclopis, hence (the proof is manifest)

  The Six Aerial Ones infallibly

  Function, and have done, and for ever will.

  Professor Chubb’s Automaton performs

  Upon the viols and virginals, plays chess,

  Ombre and loo, mistigri, tric-trac, pushpin,

  Sings Lilliburlero in falsetto, answers

  All questions put to it, and with its rubber feet

  Noiselessly dances the antique heydiguy.

  “Is it a man?” the terrible infant wonders.

  And “no”, they say, whose business it is

  To say such infants nay. And “no” again

  They shout when, after watching Dobbs and Debs

  Step simultaneously through intricate dances,

  Hammer the same tune with their rattling clogs

  In faultless unison, the infant asks,

  “And they, are they machines?”

  Music, the revelation and marvellous lie,

  Rebuilds in the minds of all a suave and curving

  Kingdom of Heaven, where the saxophone

  Affirms everlasting loves, the drums deny

  Death, and where great Tenorio, when he sings,

  Makes Picardy bloom only with perfumed roses,

  And never a rotting corpse in all its earth.

  Play, music, play! In God’s bright limelight eyes

  An angel walks and with one rolling glance

  Blesses each hungry flower in the hanging gardens.

  “Divine,” they cry, having no words by which

  To call the nameless spade a spade, “Divine

  Zenocrate!” There are dark mysteries

  Whose name is beauty, strange revelations called

  Love, and a gulph of pleasure and of awe

  Where words fall vain and wingless in the dark;

  The seen Ineffable, the felt but all-Unknown

  And Undescribed, is God. “Divine, divine!”

  The god-intoxicated shout goes up.

  “Divine Zenocrate!”

  “Father,” the terrible infant’s voice is shrill,

  “Say, father, why does the lady wear no skirts?”

  She wears no skirts; God’s eyes have never been brighter.

  The face flowers open in her emanation.

  She is suave and curving Kingdom of Heaven

  Made visible, and in her sugared song

  The ear finds paradise. Divine, divine!

  Her belly is like a mound of wheat, her breasts

  Are towers, her hair like a flock of goats.

  Her foot is feat with diamond toes

  And she - divine Zenocrate And she on legs of ruby goes.

  The face flowers tremble in the rushing wind

  Of her loud singing. A poet in the pit

  Jots down in tears the words of her Siren song.

  So every spirit as it is most pure,

  And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

  So it the rarer body doth procure

  To habit in, and is more fairly dight

  With cheerful grace and amiable sight:

  For of the soul the body form doth take;

  And soul is form and doth the body make.

  “Now, boys, together. All with me,” she cries

  Through the long sweet suspense of dominant chords;

  “For of the soul,” her voice is paradise,

  “For of the soul the body form doth take;

  And soul is form and doth the body make.”

  Zenocrate, alone, alone divine!

  God save the King. Music’s last practical joke

  Still bugling in their ears of war and glory,

  The folk emerge into the night.

  Already next week’s bills are being posted:

  Urim and Thummim, cross-talk comedians;

  Ringpok, the Magian of Tibet;

  The Two Bedelias; Ruby and Truby Dix;

  Sam Foy and Troupe of Serio-Comic Cyclists...

  Theatre of immemorial varieties,

  Old mummery, but mummers never the same!

  Twice nightly every night from now till doomsday

  The hanging gardens, bedded with pale flower faces,

  Young flowers in the old old gardens, will echo

  With ever new, with ever new delight.

  A HIGHWAY ROBBERY

  It is a scene of murder - elegant, is it not?

  You lutanists, who play to naked Queens,

  As summer sleep or music under trees,

  As luncheon on the grass - the grass on which

  The country copulatives make sport, the pale

  Grass with the tall tubed hats, the inky coats

  And rosy, rosy among the funeral black

  (Memento Vivere) a naked girl.

/>   But here the sleepers bleed, the tumbling couples

  Struggle, but not in love; the naked girl

  Kneels at the feet of one who hesitates,

  Voluptuously, between a rape and a murder.

  Bandits angelical and you, rich corpses!

  Truth is your sister, Goodness your spouse.

  Towering skies lean down and tall, tall trees

  Impose their pale arsenical benediction,

  Making all seem exquisitely remote

  And small and silent, like a village fair

  Seen from the hill-top, far far below.

  And yet they walk on the village green to whom

  The fair is huge, tumultuous, formidable. Earth

  Lies unremembered beneath the feet of dancers

  Who, looking up, see not the sky, but towers

  And bright invading domes and the fierce swings,

  Scythe-like, reaping and ravaging the quiet.

  And when night falls, the shuddering gas-flares scoop

  Out of the topless dark a little vault

  Of smoky gold, wherein the dancers still

  Jig away, gods of a home-made universe.

  CALIGULA OR THE TRIUMPH OF BEAUTY

  Prow after prow, the floating ships

  Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid;

  And Caesar on a piebald horse

  Prances with all his cavalcade.

  Drunk with their own quick blood they go.

  The waves flash as with seeing eyes;

  The tumbling cliff’s mimic their speed,

  And they have filled the vacant skies

  With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set

  Aeolus roaring with their shout,

  Made Vesta’s temple on the cape

  Spin like a circus roundabout.

  The twined caduceus in his hand,

  And having golden wings for spurs,

  Young Caesar dressed as God looks on

  And cheers his jolly mariners;

  Cheers as they heave from off the bridge

  The trippers from the seaside town;

  Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads

  And shove them bubbling down to drown.

  There sweeps a spiral curve of gesture

  From the allegoric sky;

  Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs

  Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,

  Slides down the flank of Mars and takes

  From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,

  Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops

  Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.

  A burgess tumbles from the bridge

  Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips

  From Caesar through the plunging legs

  To the blue sea between the ships.

  NERO AND SPORUS OR THE TRIUMPH OF ART

  The Christians by whose muddy light

  Dimly, dimly I divine

  Your eyes and see your pallid beauty

  Like a pale night-primrose shine,

  Colourless in the dark, revere

  A God who slowly died that they

  Might suffer the less, who bore the pain

  Of all time in a single day,

  The pain of all men in a single

  Wounded body and sad heart.

  The yellow marble, smooth as water,

  Builds me a Golden House: and there

  The marble Gods sleep in their strength

  And the white Parian girls are fair.

  Roses and waxen oleanders,

  Green grape bunches and the flushed peach

  All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,

  Knowing, loving, becoming each.

  The ship went down, my mother swam:

  I wedded and myself was wed:

  Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:

  Old Seneca too slowly bled.

  The wild beast and the victim both,

  The ravisher and the wincing bride,

  King of the world and a slave’s slave,

  Terror-haunted, deified —

  All these, sweet Sporus, I, an artist,

  Am and, an artist, needs must be.

  Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.

  And you have heard my symphony

  Of wailing voices and clashed brass,

  With long shrill flutings that suspend

  Pain o’er a muttering gulph of terrors,

  And piercing blasts of joy that end,

  Gods, in what discord! — could I have

  So hymned the Furies, were the bane

  Still sap within the hemlock stalk,

  The red swords virgin-bright again?

  Or take a child’s love that is all

  Worship, all tenderness and trust,

  A dawn-web, dewy and fragile - take

  And with the violence of lust

  Tear and defile it. You shall hear

  The breaking dumbness and the thin

  Harsh crying that is the very music

  Of shame and the remorse of sin.

  Christ died; the artist lives for all;

  Loves, and his naked marbles stand

  Pure as a column on the sky,

  Whose lips, whose breasts, whose thighs demand

  Not our humiliation, not

  The shuddering of an after-shame;

  And of his agonies men know

  Only the beauty born of them.

  Christ died, but living Nero turns

  Your mute remorse to song; he gives

  To idiot Fate eyes like a lover’s,

  And while his music plays, God lives.

  NERO AND SPORUS

  II

  Dark stirrings in the perfumed air

  Touch your cheeks, lift your hair.

  With softer fingers I caress,

  Sporus, all your loveliness.

  Round as a fruit, tree-tangled shines

  The moon; and fire-flies in the vines,

  Like stars in a delirious sky,

  Gleam and go out. Unceasingly

  The fountains fall, the nightingales

  Sing. But time flows and love avails

  Nothing. The Christians smoulder red;

  Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead;

  And you, sweet Sporus, you and I

  We too must die, we too must die.

  MYTHOLOGICAL INCIDENT

  Through the pale skeleton of woods

  Orion walks. The North Wind lays

  Its cold lips to the twin steel flutes

  That are his gun, and plays.

  Knee-deep he goes, where penny-wiser

  Than all his kind who steal and hoard,

  Year after year some sylvan miser

  His copper wealth has stored.

  The Queen of Love and Beauty lays

  In neighbouring beechen aisles her baits

  Bread-crumbs and the golden maize.

  Patiently she waits.

  And when the unwary pheasant comes

  To fill his painted maw with crumbs,

  Accurately the sporting Queen

  Takes aim. The bird has been.

  Secure, Orion walks her way.

  The Cyprian loads, presents, makes fire.

  He falls. ’Tis Venus all entire

  Attached to her recumbent prey.

  FEMMES DAMNÉES

  (from the French of Charles Baudelaire)

  The lamps had languisht and their light was pale;

  On cushions deep Hippolyta reclined.

  Those potent kisses that had torn the veil

  From her young candour filled her dreaming mind.

  With tempest-troubled eyes she sought the blue

  Heaven of her innocence, how far away!

  Like some sad traveller, who turns to view

  The dim horizons passed at dawn of day.

  Tears and the muffled light of weary eyes,

  The stupor and the dull voluptuous trance,

  Limp arms, like weapons dropped by on
e who flies

  All served her fragile beauty to enhance.

  Calm at her feet and joyful, Delphine lay

  And gazed at her with ardent eyes and bright,

  Like some strong beast that, having mauled its prey,

  Draws back to mark the imprint of its bite.

  Strong and yet bowed, superbly on her knees,

  She snuffed her triumph, on that frailer grace

  Poring voluptuously, as though to seize

  The signs of thanks upon the other’s face.

  Gazing, she sought in her pale victim’s eye

  The speechless canticle that pleasure sings,

  The infinite gratitude that, like a sigh,

  Mounts slowly from the spirit’s deepest springs.

  “Now, now you understand (for love like ours

  Is proof enough) that ‘twere a sin to throw

  The sacred holocaust of your first flowers

  To those whose breath might parch them as they blow.

  “Light falls my kiss, as the ephemeral wing

  That scarcely stirs the shining of a lake.

  What ruinous pain your lover’s kiss would bring!

  A plough that leaves a furrow in its wake.

  “Over you, like a herd of ponderous kine,

  Man’s love will pass and his caresses fall

  Like trampling hooves. Then turn your face to mine;

  Turn, oh my heart, my half of me, my all!

  “Turn, turn, that I may see their starry lights,

  Your eyes of azure; turn. For one dear glance

  I will reveal love’s most obscure delights,

  And you shall drowse in pleasure’s endless trance.”

  “Not thankless, nor repentant in the least

  Is your Hippolyta.” She raised her head.

  “But one who from some grim nocturnal feast

  Returns at dawn feels less disquieted.

  “I bear a weight of terrors, and dark hosts

  Of phantoms haunt my steps and seem to lead.

  I walk, compelled, behind these beckoning ghosts

  Down sliding roads and under skies that bleed.

  “Is ours so strange an act, so full of shame?

  Explain the terrors that disturb my bliss.

  When you say, Love, I tremble at the name;

  And yet my mouth is thirsty for your kiss.

  “Ah, look not so, dear sister, look not so!

  You whom I love, even though that love should be

  A snare for my undoing, even though

  Loving I am lost for all eternity.”

  Delphine looked up, and fate was in her eye.

  From the god’s tripod and beneath his spell,

  Shaking her tragic locks, she made reply:

  “Who in love’s presence dares to speak of hell?

 

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