Death of Virgil
Page 21
Night came apace … the reading voice became softer and softer, then it died away completely. Were the verses continuing to be enacted? Were they being enacted somewhere outside of the voice? Or had they also vanished to protect what seemed to be sleep? Perhaps he had actually slept and had not even noticed that the boy had gone in the meantime: with closed eyes as if he were not allowed to make sure, he waited, a listening guest like Aeneas, waiting for the voice to be raised once more, but it remained silent. Nonetheless, the last verses rang on in his ear, they kept on resounding and in so doing were being changed more and more, they altered—or, more correctly—they re-composed themselves to something that was like a material picture, a picture, to be sure, beyond any actual possibility of being depicted, in the same way that the moon-bright space in the window could even now be held as a picture behind closed eye-lids, while yet transmuted in form and light to something like sound; it was an after-sound in the ear, an after-image in the eye, both of them sensed but unsensual, weaving together into a unity that, already far beyond the visible and audible, was only to be grasped by a kind of sensibility in which, strangely a part of this very sensibility while strangely apart from it, the boy’s voice as well as his smile were merged. Did Saturn want to take back the names he had given? The landscape of the verses, the landscape of the earth, the landscape of the soul were becoming nameless, and the longer that he, ensconced with closed eyes in the Saturnian fields, tried to feel out and follow up this transcendental-figurative phenomenon, the more profoundly he felt and sensed it within himself, yes, the more he longed for it to be changed back to complete reality, the more he longed for the return of the reading boy, yet the more he wished all the while that this would vanish; for not only had the sorrow-dispelling seduction emanating from the boy captivated him as the advance-knowledge, the fore-echo of ringing finality, but it had also stood in the way of the ultimate voice; it was not only the entering portal but also the closing slab of the unforeseeable view opening up behind it. Was not the great whispering, the soft booming, the commanding kindness of that far-near, inconceivably all-inclusive voice, which he had heard without being able to hear it, hidden there also? Deeper than anything earthly, but yet of earth, lay the hidden birth-grave of the voice, the tomb of the beginning, the enclosed source of the birth-giving end; deep below the audible and the visible lay the meeting-place of the voices, the place which contained them all, from which they issued and to which they returned, the place where they were inaudible, the place where they were most inaudibly united and in unison, the place of their complete accord, the accord a voice in itself, the most mighty and the only one which included in itself all voices, all voices with the one exception of its own. To include all life within oneself and yet to be excluded from all life—, was this the voice of death, was it here already? was this it? Or was that which was hidden still greater than this voice? He listened into the inaudible, he listened with all the force and fervor that his will could command, but over the seas of silence, over the veiled landscapes of primal sound, breathed out into the very beginning and very end under the brooding sound-dome of primal perception, there still floated a falling sigh, enclosed in forgetfulness, enclosing forgetfulness, a most delicate dew, breathed up from the colorless-ringing plains of transparency, from their mutely resonant fields, the image of the boy’s voice, just barely visible, just barely revealed and revealing, but already veiling itself, an earthly resonance, no longer a word, no longer verse, no longer color or colorlessness, no longer transparency, but only a smile, an image of yore, the image of a smile. Names? Verses? Was there a poem, had there ever been an Aeneid? In vanishing was it flickering up a last time in the name—Aeneas?—as if this name contained an intimation of the great and good command which was lost forever, but nothing more was to be found; all that had been lived, all that had been created, the whole vast streaming-together of existence with all of its substance was being flooded off, wiped away; he found neither year nor day nor time in his searching recollections, he found nothing of anything that was known to him, he listened into his memory, although his listening perceived only a glassy confusion, terrestrial still, but already exempt from earth-bound time, exempt from earthly remembrance, a glassily-feverish singing confusion of shapes growing out of a no-time and extending into a no-time, and the more his memory reached toward the Aeneid, the quicker song after song vanished, leaving no trace, dissolved into the ringing intricacy of this glare: was this coming home to the sources of the poem? The memorable content of the poem was disappearing; whatever had been celebrated by the poem, —seafaring and sunny strands, war and the sound of arms, the lot of the gods and the orbits of the starry courses—this and more besides, written down or unwritten, fell quite away, all of it stripped off, the poem had discarded it like a useless garment and was returning back into the unveiled nakedness of its hidden being, into the vibrating invisible from which poetry stems, subsumed again by the pure form, finding itself there like its own echo, like the soul housed in its crystal shell, singing of itself. The superfluous had been discarded but was nevertheless preserved, having become durable in an indestructible form, the purity of which excludes forgetfulness and impresses even the perishable with the stamp of eternity. Poem and speech existed no longer, but the soul common to both was still in existence, surviving in its own crystal reflection; the human soul had died off into the profoundest depths of forgetfulness, but the language of the soul lived on, surviving in the singing clarity of its form; soul and speech, parted from each other yet implicated in and reflecting one another—, did they not receive this reflected light from that inaccessible abyss from which everything issues and to which it comes home? were they not, though each locked off in itself, communally included in that home-voice which bursts through all boundaries, because in vibrating beyond every limitation it gives promise of the goal, of encouragement, of help, and of comfort? Oh, voice of yore in your rising and falling, soft cradle-voice having once sounded, enveiling and unveiling the world, starry voice of the cradle-night, singing the sweet companion song of unity! “I am alone,” he said, “no one has died for me, no one dies with me; I looked for support, I have striven to the utmost for it, I have implored it, but it has not been bestowed upon me.”—“Not quite here, but yet at hand,” came the response so dream-soft from his own breast that it was no longer the voice of the boy but far more that of night and of all nights, the voice of silvery space which is nocturnal solitude, the ever-seen but never-explored dome of the night, along the walls of which he had groped ever so often and which had now come to be only a voice. “Not quite here, but yet at hand,” gracious and lordly, seductive and enjoining, night-lit and deep-hidden, the spontaneous sounding of the word and the spontaneous sounding of the soul, the unity of language and humanhood; and it was like taking leave of the ageless, erstwhile youth of all things earthly, and yet saluting the homeland, everlasting in hope, where even the stone had turned into transparency and the grave-slabs had become transparent as though they were composed of crystal and ether together. In this wise he stepped through, he didn’t step, he stood suddenly in the midst of a dream-dome that was nothing but the beaming impression of voices, he stood in a bottomless radiance, in a radiance without walls or ceiling, amidst domes of radiant transparency and, seeing into the midst of the invisible, he was unable to see even himself, he too had become transparent. Without having taken a step, indeed without the least attempt to take a step or make any movement whatsoever, he had been moved forward, but still not moved across; it was still the forecourt of reality that surrounded him, he had not yet forsaken terrestrial things, it was still an earthbound dream, and he—a dream within a dream—realized the dreamy nature of what was happening to him: it was a dream on the borders of dream. For although nothing in this steadily increasing clarity of streaming transparency recalled the former clash of realities, and although nothing concrete, nothing human, nothing animal was to be seen, moreover, although even the memory of them was no
more to be traced, washed as they were in the radiantly booming, inaudible waves of muteness, he knew himself to be in the hopeless entanglement of clashing voices, now as before, only that now voices, things, creatures, plants, animals and men, one and all, had turned into most inconceivable beings, into an airy structure in which names still shimmered like stars, though by this very act of shimmering the names were cast off; he found himself in a region in which only the quantities, the arrangements and the correlations of earthly things were valid, likewise only the knowledge emanating from them and their erstwhile forms, and it was occurrence and knowledge, perception and exposition in one single, gleaming possession of truth, it was an unimaginable exposure of the creation’s multiplicity, empty of content but complete, the integration of everything that had occurred or could occur, differentiated a myriadfold but indistinguishable, the suggestive meaninglessness changed to pure form, to the bare outlines of form which is nothing more than crystalline clarity, an impenetrable, sparkling transparency, inexistent even while existing, being without origin. He was in the realm of the infinite. The pathways of the millenniums revealed themselves as endless sheaves of light, straggling in any and all directions, they were carriers of the eternal and brought the finite into ultimate infinity, the thing done having the same weight as the thing undone, good and evil crossing each other with equal impressiveness and illuminative force, and there was no way out of the seeing-blindness, the hearing-deafness of the dream, no way out of the dream-dome, of the dream-dazzlement, the dream so estranged from discrimination that it opens up no path to the good, an unbounded, shoreless flood. And this silvery, coruscating, radiant dream-stuff—, did it touch the soul? did it touch the god? Oh, were the dream ever so earthly it was beyond the earthly affairs of men, and the dreamer was one who had lost his human birthright, his human productiveness, he was fatherless and motherless from his very inception; he was in the pre-maternal cave of fate itself, from which there was no escape. No one laughs while dreaming, no one laughs where there is no way out, the dream was not to be burst asunder. Oh, who dares to laugh where even mutiny is silenced! There was no possible defiance to oppose to the dream, there was only entanglement and acceptance, entanglement in the happenings of the dream. And involved in the dazzling thicket, caught into the ramifications within the dream and extending beyond it, identified with each single dream-point, with each separate crystal ray of the million-faceted transparency, he also transparent, he also homeless and rootless, a dream-orphan from the very start, he also occurrence and knowledge in one, enacting himself in a dream, aware of his own dreaming, himself a very dream, he spoke; and speaking from a breast that was no longer a breast, from a mouth that had ceased to be a mouth, with a breath that was less than a breath, speaking words that were scarcely words, he said:
“Fate, thou camest before all the gods,
Thou wast prepared in the mists long before any creation,
Nakedness thou of the clouded beginning, and true
To self alone, the cold, all-penetrating form.
Creation and Creator thou in one,
At once occurrence and knowledge and meaning,
The force of thy nakedness penetrates god and man
Commanding the Created.
Upon thy command the god delivered himself
From his inexistence and became Father,
Calling the name of light out of muteness,
From the womb of the primeval, darkness-enshrouded mother,
Calling to identity the unnamed,
Calling the unshaped into shape.
Primordial silence became speech and primal sound
Turned into singing, the spheres themselves singing thy word.
But in the dream, oh Fate, thou takest it back again,
Thou hushest it back into blankness,
Terrible, all-concealing, into thy denuded being,
And as a crystal flake the god himself sinks
Ray-melted into the empty dome of the dream.”
Unmoved and gleaming the dream-dome absorbed the silent words, reflecting them silently and carrying them off into the echo-lack of the last light, and it seemed as if they themselves had been that radiant echo. Then he spoke on:
“Dream-saturating, dream-chilled Fate, thou
Revealest thyself in dream, bringing the dream
To the grandeur of a time in which reality inheres, making the dream
The receptacle of the Creation, working through thee
And through thee timeless; for thou knowest neither before nor after,
Reality that thou art.—
Lavishly flows thine essence, oh arch-form, flows
Outspreading and fertile with life-stuff between the storm clouds
Mute-mighty in union, between the light and the night
Of Creation, created at thy behest; but thou
Transformest thyself from one into the other
With the looping current of thy flowing,
Wishing to flow lightward—ah, canst thou?—yet where
Thy currents converge, as at a goal, stream on stream dependent,
There in serenity thou revealest the name and object of worldly truth,
United one into the other, evoked into wholeness to mirror thee,
Fate-stamped, the archetype of being, the archetype of truth.
Dream-form emerges from dream-form, overlaid and unfolded,
In dream thou art I, thou art my perception,
Born with me as an unborn angel,
Beyond mischance, the shining omni-form
Of essence and order in which knowledge itself is born,
Shape of myself, my knowledge.
God-delivered, god-destroying Fate,
Eternal Reality, I am eternal with thee,
A mortal, god-destroying in dream where I,
Enacting myself in thee, dissolving in thy brightness,
Enclosed in childhood, am myself the habitation of the god.”
Was this the last habitation? was this the final resting-place? was not even this in movement? did he not have to move it forward? he tried to take a step, he tried to lift his arms, he tried to impart himself to this gleaming space which he already was, he tried this with great will-power, with utmost effort, and although the glassy transparency of his no longer apparent being did not allow for any sort of movement, he succeeded: a trembling, dreamy and remote, ran through him; oh, it was scarcely the intimation of a trembling, oh, it was scarcely an awareness of such an intimation, however it was at the same time—how could it have been otherwise—like a sympathetic vibration of the dream-dome, flooding back and forth as though the quiver were passing through the motionless, glinting paths of streaming light, through their intersections, raying out in every or no direction, passing through their effulgence of which it can and cannot be spoken, like a first and final shudder, scarcely noticeable yet somehow felt, the breath of a receding shadow, unstirred by a breath but withal a recollection of earthly life. Thereupon he spoke again:
“Unescapable! Have I mounted to thee or
Have I stumbled into thy depths?
Abyss of form,
Abyss of above and below, abyss of the dream!
In the dream no one is able to laugh, likewise
No one is able to die—, behold,
How over-near to laughter is death, and behold
How far from both is Fate, to whom, since he is merely form,
Death has taught nothing of laughter—
This Fate, thy self-betrayal.
But I, a mortal, I, familiar with death,
Compelled by death to laughter,
I revolt from thee, I trust in thee no longer.
Dream-blind and dream-enlightened, I comprehend thy death,
I know the limit set for thee,
The boundary of dream that thou deniest.
Art thou also aware of it? Dost thou will it so?
Does thy being halt at thy command? Or does something greater halt thee?
More inevitable, less discernible, and beyond and beyond,
Fate upon Fate, blank form on blank form, row on row,
Waits there the unattainable Nothing, the birth-death,
The very twin of Chance?
All law is subject to chance, to the fall into the abyss,
And thou too, oh, Fate, for in thy realm, including thee in its havoc,
There rages the chance of finality.
Suddenly growth ceases and the branches of wisdom,
Bough from bough sprouted, die off and drift
Into nullified speech,
Isolated into the object, isolated into the word,
Order in ruins, truth in ruins, brotherhood and concord
Benumbed in incompletion, torpid in the underbrush
Of specious existence.
Thou bringest forth the incomplete, thou sufferest the mishap,
Thou must tolerate evil, imperfection, deception, and
Thyself unrealized, no longer eternal in thy frozen form,
Fate of Fate, thou diest of evil, while yet in the crystal with me.” It was not he speaking, it was the dream that spoke; it was not he thinking, it was the dream that thought; it was not he dreaming, it was the dome of destiny radiating into the dream which dreamed; it was the dreaming of the unattainable, the interminable domed fixation of light, transfixed by evil, transfixing through evil, and there, motionlessly flooded in the cascades of light, was the temple of his unattainable soul. The light was unstirred, unstirred the healing cycle of adversity, unstirred even the breath. And lacking breath the dream spoke on:
“Form, even though arch-form, perishable for the mortal,
Perishable for the god, perishable in thy unreality,
Perishable in thy seething and specious wholeness,
Beyond redemption! though the part may pretend to be all,
Though it wish to hark back to the womb of the erstwhile maternal arch-night,
Though, usurping completeness, it even assume the summoning,