The drug sets right what culture has made wrong;
The drug produces the external signs
That Ecotheism requires of us:
Humility, contentment, tolerance
Of others in like state, a wise acceptance
Of the world, a high threshold of boredom;
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And chemists testify how dopamine
Receptor sites decrease in number
In the brain with long use of the drug,
And serotonin levels rise, and androgens
Diminish, and adrenalin decays.
This is the end of steroid poisoning;
Most cancer rates must fall; the brutal male
Of sperm and blood is rendered mild and good;
The woman knows no grief and cramp and rage
When the dark time of the month comes around;
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The lifespan of the user is enlarged.
Some days later Ruhollah is set free.
Garrison seems an addict of the drug;
But something in him that must love his pain,
Or fear his happiness, turns him away.
His mind in any case is quite confused;
One night he goes into his mother’s room,
Watches her breathing, as he’s done before;
But this time he is drawn up closer still
To where he sees in veins upon her neck
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Beat, undiminished, her vitality;
And as a child will gingerly enfold
A kitten with its hand, he lets his hands
Pass round her throat in loving symbiosis
So that like kneading bread or fondling
That which requires release to take its fill
He might thus purge his appetites in hers
And set the balance of the world aright.
But just as he’s about to squeeze, she wakes;
Not in alarm, but as a dream had ended
180
Where it should, leaving the dreamer free
To swim up briefly to the realm of light.
Her blue eyes open like a girl’s, she stares
Without comprehension into his face;
She has become quite happy now, he sees,
An innocent, a valuable statesman
For the cause of all the weak and the poor,
A symbol standing for the natural.
Instead of what he was about to do,
He therefore kisses her and lets her go;
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She falls again to sleep; his spirit is
At last defeated utterly by hers.
And Tripitaka wanders through the city
Seeking he knows not what. In a café
A girl, a groupie of the Games, comes up;
She recognizes him from video.
In Athens, quite unlike those country districts
Chance chose for his last draught of life, such ease
And licence of address have gotten common;
Now it has further implications, in the style
200
Of a sincere religious intimacy,
Affected by the Ecotheists, who
Assume all persons equal in the sight
Of God, and thus all differences between
One and another to be signs of pride;
They therefore somewhat hector you with smiles,
And take your arm, ignoring the details
Of what one’s choice of company might be.
So Tripitaka hides behind the show
Of military blankness of expression;
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But finds to his surprise he likes the girl.
And adolescence, thank the lord, has not
Yet lost its yen to be at least outrageous;
Yanni—she calls herself—plucks up her courage
And really tries as best she can to get
This young man who would terrify her parents
To make a woman of her. Tripitaka,
Infinitely tender, must explain
The sickness for the second time to one
Whose life must not be injured by it; though
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The doctors tell him any risk is slight.
But unlike Sachiko, this Yanni is
Not thus so easily put off; “You seem
To be so sad, for such a famous man,”
She says; “It’s something I can do for you,
To smooth away your pain. I’ll take the risk.”
And Tripitaka’s generosity
Is such that at these words he feels a shock
Of hot desire almost forgotten, so
He need not lie; she knows he is not lying
230
When he then tells her how he wants her, but
How it would shatter him to be the one
To soil her body with his old disease.
“But there are other ways,” she says, as if
She knew of such sophistications; he
Knows he’s on safe ground with her ignorance
And can invent a danger that’s not there.
But in his hotel room that night alone,
Having with courtly gentleness sent home
This totally surprising seductress
240
Rightly convinced that she has conquered him,
He finds a certain spring of feeling flow
As if some obstacle has been removed;
And now he longs and pines with love’s sour honey
For Beatrice van Riebeck, as before;
And this time strangely there is no resistance,
No stubborn censor of his thoughts and pain.
He knows now he must serve that Beatrice
As a crusader served a lady; or
Must be undone by her as justice would.
250
And is not chivalry the finer when
Quite out of date and inappropriate,
And under moral censure, it still flowers
Out of the spirit like a sport or freak
Of something ancient, guilty, beautiful?—
Something out of the priesthood of our Adam,
The antique dumbness of a beaten sword?
Garrison waits for Tripitaka’s coming
As if this were the only chance that’s left
To form his life into the shape of truth.
260
But though he watches the arrivals closely,
He somehow misses his return, and must
Be surprised next morning by his presence.
The weather has renewed the heats of summer;
The guards make it a practice every dawn
To bathe in the Alpheus where a sandbank
Dams up the current in a long blue pool.
Garrison goes there sometimes just to watch—
He loves their naked carelessness and play—
But does not join them; he is not invited.
270
This time there is a piebald body in
The company of bathers. Garrison’s
Heart leaps, recognizing Tripitaka,
And now a strange confusion overcomes him;
Almost too shy to walk back with his friend
As Tripitaka dries off with his towel,
He tags along, not the assured zealot
Any more, but a boy sick with desires
He does not understand. But Tripitaka,
Renewed in spirit, and here with the brother
280
Of his pale beloved, not yet aware
That contradictions heavy as the world
Must now attend his actions, eagerly
Questions Garrison about the progress
Of the Taos talks, and of the plans
Of the Van Riebeck rebels afterwards.
“We have to set them free,” says Garrison,
“That will be in the treaty certainly.
It means for now we’ve lost. But when the comet—”
>
He gestures at the smudge of white that glows
290
Low in the western sky against the dawn—
“Has safely struck on Mars, we’ll try again.”
Garrison speaks unthinkingly, and then
On impulse asks his friend to join him
On his secluded terrace for some breakfast.
Once there, to the surprise of Tripitaka,
Garrison starts to weep, and tells how he
Had wandered in the desert of despair,
How he had even contemplated murder
And thus how suicide seemed sweet and good
300
In this blind alley of the lonely world.
“But what about our faith?” asks Tripitaka;
“Have you forgotten what we did it for?”
Ten days before, this conversation might
Have ended otherwise, for then the younger
Was cast down with a dread not different
By much, from what his older friend feels now.
But Garrison perceives the change that’s come
On Tripitaka as a sign that he
Is qualified to punish him and thus
310
To purge the guilt he can no longer bear.
He kneels down to his friend, and now, before
Either knows what is happening, has parted
The bathing towel and has sunk his face
In penance, adoration, and desire
Into the loins of the warrior,
With their soft flocculence of grey affliction.
Gently, as if he were a patient doctor
Lifting a flap of torn flesh from a wound,
Or like a mother with a fevered child,
320
Tripitaka raises the long head
Of Garrison from where it lies between
His thighs, and sets it to one side, and stands,
Turning to tie the towel back again.
He looks at Garrison and pities him;
A child whose father has molested her
Can sometimes feel such pity with her fear,
But Tripitaka only fears the future,
Void as it lies now of any bar or screen
To set before the knowledge of his crime.
330
“Oh Garrison,” he says, so softly that
His friend can scarcely hear, or understand;
“I see now I have killed an innocent man.
May God have mercy on our souls.” With this
He leaves the terrace; Garrison looks up,
And breathes in tremulously, feels a clump
Of fleshly sorrow rise around his heart
That must escape as a great arid sob.
And what’s my purpose with these puppetries?
Psychology’s a clean whore, plausible
340
To the sophisticated trade, and turns
A dozen tricks a day. How have my heroes
Come to this place?—where settled principle,
Coherence of intention and idea,
The cosmos balanced with the acting soul,
Imagination like a demigod
Building, from what materials a life
With all its limitations self-imposed
Or else contingent will supply, a meaning—
Where all these things are made subordinate
350
To the trite buttons of a threadbare motive?
Better the hypocrite, the moralist,
The foolish martinet, the tragic gargoyle,
Than we the suave and slimy tolerators
Of human weakness, by whose smooth excuse
The human beast divine is novelized.
And Tripitaka, who is named for one
Who kept a faith and carried through the mountains
Scriptures that have lived two thousand years,
Now feels the sullen glory of his name
360
Call him again to chivalry and death,
And will not let his disillusionment
With his friend Garrison divert his purpose.
He will escape all our interpretation;
He will defy verisimilitude
Bought by conformity to expectation;
He will drag us, whose notions are enmired
In clichés from the twentieth century,
“Kicking and screaming” into an ancient world.
Garrison strikes a certain contract too.
370
After his erstwhile friend has left, he falls
Into a great calm, like paralysis;
He recognizes what he is, a cripple,
Bound for a certain time to walk the earth;
He shall take on the robe of parricide,
Blinding himself in punishment and pride,
And so possess those goods for which a crime
Such as this is might be committed—freedoms
Such as shall fit a very scourge of God.
A few days later orders long expected
380
Arrive for Tripitaka, which will send
Him back to Flinders Dome for three more weeks
Of training for the next Olympic War.
The old dispute between Australia
And Indonesia over Irian Jaya
(The western territory of New Guinea)
Has broken out once more. The mountain tribes
Now rise again to claim their independence
From Jakarta; their cousins in Papua
Begin to send them arms; the Ecotheists,
390
Neutral in this conflict, see a chance
To take the world’s attention from the stain
Of the humiliating treaty signed
At Taos; the Javan paramilitary
Stands at the Papuan frontier, and so
The UN has declared a state of war.
Thailand, Malaysia, and New Zealand, bound
By friendship pacts, line up with Papua
And Canberra, but still the conflict seems
Unequal by the strict Olympic code.
400
So Tripitaka leaves, without farewells.
Tripitaka goes to war against the enemies of Australia in the Olympiad; the poem follows the course of the war, and the revolt of the warriors against the Ecotheist world order. Tripitaka escapes with some of them and joins the Martian forces, in an attempt to expiate the murder of his benefactor Chance.
Scene ii:
The Olympic War
The protocols of the Olympic charter
Permit for each million of population
A state to field one soldier in the wars.
Now Tripitaka comes, in time to see
The muster of the allies: first, the Aussies,
In their lopsided hats and khaki shorts,
Eighteen men and eighteen women (marching,
Brown rangy Sheilas from the women’s camp,
Including Tripitaka’s friend the sergeant),
10
Finely equipped with microcircuitry
And lightweight life-support, and fancy optics;
Next, the Malaysians, thirty-eight of them,
Trained like the Aussies in the Brit tradition,
With chequered caps and ceremonial kris;
Then the large body of the Thais, an army
Numbering a hundred forty-one,
And boasting in their ranks two kick-boxers
Of most advanced degree, and sharpshooters
Expert in the Zen arts of archery;
20
Then seven grinning “sheppoes” from New Zealand
With their sophisticated jamming gear;
And last, the nine dark Papuans, whose eyes
Glow like a woodfire under beetle brows,
Some of the canniest and fiercest soldiers
In the world, aficionados say.
They line up in parade, and silence falls;
The head count is two
hundred thirty-one.
Forty miles off, the Indonesian force
Stands at attention by their simple flag
30
Of red and white: three hundred twenty-nine.
And now begins the toughest phase of training,
The tuning of the flesh to perfect pitch,
The melding of the forces into one,
The matching of the men and women to
The tiny powerful machines of war.
According to Olympic rules each army may
Take into battle just as much equipment,
Weapons, and supplies as it can carry,
Lighter-than-air devices banned for freight,
40
And nuclear weapons totally forbidden.
All other portable materiel
Being permitted, every army has
A group of weightlifters whose duty is
To carry in one trip across the mile
Of DMZ around the reservation
Those largest instruments of modem war:
The lightweight observation planes and strafers;
The tractor-bikes, recoilless guns, and radars;
The water-stills and workshops, hospitals,
50
And raw materials and tools to stock
The mobile factories that they will build.
Whole libraries exist of books and tapes
Of theory and advanced mathematics on
The parsimony, packing, scheduling,
And gaming calculus of those old wars;
Boys in those days played endless battle-games
On home computers with illegal turbos
To replicate Olympic strategies.
The battleground, ten thousand square miles
60
In the center of Australia, is not
A hospitable place for humankind.
Desert and scrub, the mallee and the wattle,
Gaunt-limbed ghost gum smelling of oil of camphor,
Coarse grass, stony gibber desert, dry lakes
With rims of bitter salts and sweetheart’s names;
Eroded outcrops of fantastic stone;
Balancing rocks and places where the wind,
As hot as ovens, whistles in a crevice;
Sometimes a hopping mirage from a nightmare
70
Of the Pleistocene, a mob of ‘roos;
Domes of rabbits; lorikeets, cockatoos.
Under the sun the colors burn to tan,
To dull brass albedo and brilliant grey,
Crimson and ocher of the bloodbark; sometimes
After a rain a carpet of blue lupins
As sweet as dawn, or cannas of vermilion
So tender that red seems the softest tint.
Always the smell of silicates and soda,
Rocks split by the heat or the night chill,
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Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 16
