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About the vegetarian who was
A cannibal, and ate a rutabaga.
How does a Green know who his mother is?
He counts his father and divides by one.
Why don’t carrots eat Fruitarians?
No flavor. Then why do they call them Greens?
—Distinguish them from vegetables…. Some
Were quite grim: How many Greens it takes
To put you into jail. Three: one to lock
The door, the other two to lose the key.
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The big Green boss calls all the Greens together;
From now on all the rhubarb will wear pants,
To take away temptation, understand.
You had to be there, I guess you would say.
The thing that must’ve riled the Greens the most
Was Charlie’s cloning of his own skin-tissue
Into a fetus, just to prove a point.
Was it abortion then to break the skin?
Does every shave I take murder a twin?
Well Chance found Uncle Charlie there in ‘Twenty,
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Still no degree, a hundred major papers
Under a dozen noms de plume; hired him
To mastermind the secret Ares project.
“Freya was just sixteen when Charlie came.
Everyone knew she was her Daddy’s girl.
And that was the beginning of the trouble;
Rose—who is Gaea now—had realized
That she herself could never match the love
Her daughter felt for Chance and his designs.
How do I know all this? Well Charlie told me.
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I guess the German thing to do—though Charlie
Doesn’t always do what you expect—
Is take to wife the Herr Professor’s daughter.
Freya liked Charlie because Chance liked him;
Rose saw it as a way that Chance had found
To keep his precious daughter close at hand.
But what outsiders often don’t perceive—
And Rose, although she had the family strength
And guts and will, was always an outsider—
Is that Van Riebecks act on principle:
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They figure that’s the only game in town.
Sure, it turned out that Chance always came first
For Freya. It was Beatrice who saw
The special stuff that makes our Charlie run,
What must have made Chance pick him in the first place
—Brains being two a penny in those days.
Charlie just always gave what he could give,
And took the satisfaction of his work.
The miracle was how at Chance’s wake
Charlie and Bea got lucky and got pregnant.
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It was, uh, chance, I guess. The rest you know.”
Tripitaka is reunited with his mother Sumikami. The life of the colonists is described.
Scene iv:
The Colony
As Tripitaka leaves, he notices
Under a nearby tree a little person
Dressed in a silk kimono, waiting for him.
He sees it is his mother Sumikami.
This should not be surprising, but it is.
For many years he’s put her from his mind:
His father was the theme of his endeavors.
Likewise, his healing at the hands of Chance
And the others, being a debt, has lain,
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With all inducements to the path of feeling,
In that part of the soul where sleep the dead.
In Greece he had slept barely thirty yards
From her whose body he had shared, yet not,
Because of ideology, come face
To face with her; now, more than he can bear,
After the shock of Beatrice’s marriage,
After the bitter pang of their forgiveness,
After the strangeness of the girl Irene,
He feels that painful love, like a great tumor
20
Of the throat and heart, which comes to one
Who knows he has neglected the most dear.
And in that moment, as he kneels once more,
And takes her fragile body in his arms,
He knows he is the stepchild of Japan,
Of the old, tormented, filial regime
That turned the man into a perfect blade,
But made of him his mother’s son forever.
And that in him which sought the new, the free,
The priestly deserts of Australia,
30
Is but an iridescence in the weave,
A watering upon a polished blade,
A wind that blows a while among the willows.
And what is human freedom after all?
At any moment that which I can do
Is only what I can, and I am bound
By those capacities inherited
From my genetic and my social past.
Am I then just a character within
A novel, chained to probability,
40
Verisimilitude defined as fate?
Can I do other than that thing I do?
And would that set me free in any case?
What if I could perform a random act?
What if I could subvert the text that writes me?
Ruhollah thought that was the way of grace.
But now his mind goes back to all his training;
How there was once a time when he was not
The thing he has become, one capable
Of violence perfect as a hammered sword,
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So perfect that his spirit takes no pride
In it—a matter of indifference,
Even of disgust, to him, who has killed
So many times that he cannot remember.
That thing he is, though, he was not at all;
He was not capable of what he is.
Therefore by choice he’s altered all the rules
That govern psychic probability.
Nor was the choice at random, which he sees
As simply a fine way of talking nonsense;
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Nor was it yet compelled by birth or breeding,
Since neither birth nor breeding could predict
The consequences of his choice to be
A warrior (—the discipline of soul,
The possibility of forced events,
The new eligibility for crime,
The suffering of one whose flesh is sharp,
So that who touches him must be impaled,
That last indifference to his own powers)
Which might have changed his choice had he foreseen them.
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The discipline itself, the martial arts,
Ancient as kinship, music, poetry,
Passed down from samurai to samurai,
Burned in that holy Shaolin monastery
To a white fire of spirit’s purity,
Wedded to earth and to the farmer’s wisdom
On beaten Okinawan threshing floors—
That discipline itself had been the game
Which promised him the freedom of the spirit
And at last gave it when he did not want it.
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Is freedom then the choice of discipline?
More; for the masters of that antique trade
Each gave to it the flower of themselves.
Each, as a poet tinkers O so del-
Icately with the living membrane
Of the tongue he loves and speaks with, each
Added katas, turns of philosophy,
Little movements of the hip that might
Deliver perfect violence to that
Soft point where Brother Adversary lived,
90
Rituals to tune the body and the mind.
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And it was these refinements, these small works
Of living art that were the way to freedom.
So freedom is the breath of the tradition.
And there’s no freedom in the present moment,
But for the flash of play, irrelevant,
That turns us to a discipline of years;
Freedom is ages long, not seconds long,
Time is the medium of liberty,
And time is made by art’s and love’s delays,
100
The slow crafts of the spirit’s history.
And now consider that great work of craft,
That terrible discipline, that fierce play,
That act of making that will change the rules:
The planoforming of the world of Mars.
This was the metaphor the warrior sought,
The scripture he will carry through the mountains:
That freedom is not found nor exercised,
Chosen nor seized, but, like this planet, made.
Thus service is a kind of perfect freedom.
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Sumikami has taken on that art
And is the teacher and the governess
Of the Van Riebeck children. It was she
Who noticed how, at that sweet stage of childhood
When boys and girls must imitate the birds
And run with outstretched arms and makeshift wings
About the colony, their feet seemed ready
Sometimes, to leave the ground. Once Wolf had made
A pair of white wings for his sister from
A sheet of lightweight plastic foam; she tried
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Them by the roaring ventilation ducts
And Sumikami watched her glide and tumble.
With quiet insistence she besought the help
Of one of Charlie’s engineers, who grew
From a gull’s genes planted in bamboo
The first true wings of the Diaspora.
In keeping with the Japanese tradition,
That still preserves the perverse difference
Between the education of the sexes,
She’d taught Irene how to dance, and Wolf
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The first five steps and cuts of swordsmanship.
And this instinctive training of the body,
This second nature by which we’re set free,
Together with the ease of children raised
In Martian gravity, taught them to fly.
By this time baby Chance was three years old,
The first true Martian, born on Martian soil.
Wolf and Irene loved him jealously,
The way a child will love a puppydog,
Guarding him in their arms and quarreling
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Who was to hold him next. They were his teachers
In the air, and they terrified their nurse
By taking him, quite unafraid, as high
As the hot lamps set in the cavern roof.
On Mars a four-year-old weighs thirteen pounds;
These children do not need to dream of flying.
Now Tripitaka plays the colonist:
The daily toil upon the Martian surface
In a green light—the clouds are saturated
With a plumed aerial phytoplankton,
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Reflect the virid glow of moss and fern
Back to the oceans all aheave with kelp
And eutrophied with emerald and jade
So dark and velvet green that topside workers
Enter a world of pinkish brilliance
As strange as the pink pearl or rosy diamond
When they return to the warm lights of Base;
The long sessions with Nesh at the computers
(Now largely wetware, or organic circuits),
Which, if you’ve talent but no discipline,
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Can gradually eat up all your time,
So perfectly is this machinery
Matched to that juice of curiosity
The brain secretes to get an itch to scratch;
The quiet dinners round the family table
Under a loggia of vine and jasmine,
Charlie at one end, Beatrice at the other,
The children sixty-five percent behaved
But making eyebrows at each other when
Parental inattention gives the chance;
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The evenings when the sager citizens
Debate political economy
Towards the constitutional convention
Set for the following year, while lighter souls
Attend the little comic opera,
Or hoot at the satirical revue;
The open school where young and old can teach
And learn the elements of poetry—
Meter, the sciences, and storytelling:
Myth, dreaming, and the art of ritual
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(By which humanity may purge itself
Of self-concern), and sweet philosophy,
Whose spring and dwelling place is poetry.
Sometimes at night Charlie will walk the lawns
Between the easy bleached wood bungalows
And let the raindrops from the sprinklers
Patter upon his head as on the roofs
And breathe in the warm grass after the shower.
Someone is practicing a polonaise
Behind a dim-lit curtain; he remembers
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The pleasant suburb of Vienna where
He spent his summers with his grandparents,
And smelt the honeysuckle on the fence;
As if all that mild life of family
And home and bourgeois complication from
The previous century, the barking dog
Settling down after the stranger’s passed,
The pink parabolas of lamplight cast
Across the ceiling by somebody’s shades,
The soft sound of a neighbor’s car reversing,
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The smell of women and cigars, of cooking,
Polish, and upholstery, that wafted
Through an open door, the rise of voices
Talking about the Philharmonic—as
If these, and so much more, were resurrected
And poured across the windowsills of Mars.
That human suburb-place must always be,
Where children may be raised and gardens watered;
Whether in Maidenhead or Saint-Germain,
Or Tuckahoe, Lake Forest, Pasadena,
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Chapultepec, Atsugi, Kuntsevo,
Or his own green dorf in the Wienerwald;
The cave of that illusion which we cast
With twined fingers by the hearth of love.
Stranger than Mars itself, thinks Charlie, but
Man muss ein Fremder sein, to know that place.
But sometimes the good dream turns to nightmare.
Charlie like all of us can feel the ague
Of being lost here in this foreign world
Whose substance is so thin the backing shows
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And it would not take much to see your life
As sitting on a stone in a dank place
With nothing real to occupy your mind.
This is so hard to say. Have you not felt
The world as wearisome and artificial,
Just a few layers of tedious games between
An emptiness as unremarkable
As certain small bad habits of the mind
And you, the royal child your mother loved?
Have you not felt the world could be quite other
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Or you could act quite otherwise, and yet
It wouldn’t matter in the least; or you
Could be another person than you are,
And have that person’s memories, and yet
Not be the same? And lost fore
ver thus,
Wandering streets you cannot quite remember,
Or walking in a grand and tedious landscape
Where there is nowhere that dear place called home,
Or dearness is a feeling you may know
But not experience—lost thus, have you
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Not feared sleep because it breaks the flow
Of consciousness, the only thing that’s left?
Or woken from a long unpleasant dream
You can’t remember, in a calm, numb panic
Unable to recall just who you are?
The endless hour of affectlessness?
The aching love and the nostalgia for
The very persons that you speak with daily
As if it were a film show of the dead,
Or worse, as if you were a ghost yourself
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And visited your family unperceived
Or in the body of another person?
Oh, there are poets today who can put this
In perfect images of alienation
And make it almost chic to feel this way.
I speak to you in plain words thus to test
Whether you know this thing, this very evil.
I tell you there are those who from these depths,
Stripped of all powers of temperament and mood,
Can rise up like a flaming bird of courage
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By their pure essence, and can bless the game,
And find that artificial universe,
That thin layer of molded plastic which
The world’s revealed to be at such a time,
A garden of pathetic loveliness,
A drama that requires our tenderness.
And if that knowledge makes it worse for you
Who have not flown up from the pit as they,
So much the worse for you; and that may be
A consolation, that it can be worse;
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Perhaps your anger then can keep you warm.
No other poem than this will tell you so.
If you would put away the world, and be
The ghost that you have felt yourself to be,
That, even, might be not so bad. Alone
You may fly the dark mountains of wisdom
Like a drugged glider in the cliffs of shadow.
Or even turn to God, but be quite sure
He doesn’t buy you, though He ransom you.
He is a moody God, and oftentimes
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He will have no other god before Him
And every human maker is a god.
This little cave-hole on the tortured planet
Can be a place of terror; the children have
No need to dream of flying, but they wake
Crying with fear about the roof collapsing,
Monsters and dragons bursting in above;
And Beatrice yearns after animals
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 19
