Who taught the Cardinal the scale of love.
At twelve she had a dozen aching lovers,
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And yet all chaste, as pure as is the snow;
This was a thing intact, inviolate
As is the chiefest casket of your soul,
That without which all motive falls to nothing,
That which you treasure up even to death;
Not a virginity of inexperience,
But that great shiver of the total spirit,
Faced, in the flower of reflexivity,
With the dark predicate of everything,
The absence of itself that is the place
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Where its effective gifts must now be given.
Chance was the one who could interpret this;
He was her knight, her servant, and her scribe.
This book would be impossible if he
Were not the breath of wholesome cooking-smoke
That shows the sunbeam from the open door:
The Hemmings and the Condell of the poet,
As Aaron to the harelip friend of God,
The faithful Plato to his Socrates,
The loving John and Mark of the Messiah.
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The first story of her theodicy
(As I shall try to pluck it through the veil
That parts our past from that new-minted world)
Concerns poor Chance, one of the first to know
Her strange conception and her borrowed birth
—How she was both his sister and his niece.
It was the year Irene lost the election,
And Chance had been her campaign manager.
Her brother Wolf had nicely won his precinct,
And, as one version has it, Chance had come
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To comfort her in her defeat and envy.
His artless chatter with his wounded boss
Turned to his favorite, Hermione,
And how her ancestry made her an Eve,
The reunited blood of all the races.—
It was not like him: somehow he let slip
The truth that Freya was her grandmother.
(And yet events proved Chance the wiser here
Than anyone might guess, even his mother.)
Irene’s ear for detail did not err.
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What Chance could not have known was how
Close to despair she must have been already.
Her mother, Freya’s, death, still unavenged;
The suicide of Tripitaka who
Was still her only lover in the world;
Her long estrangement from her brother Wolf
(For what had passed between them might not be
Harmlessly taken up nor yet forgotten)—
All these were heavy on her, and the story
That she forced from Chance ratified them.
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Her sweet stepmother had then in one blow
Deprived her of her act of sacrifice,
Deceived her as one might a foolish child,
And stolen from her what she did not then
Hold valuable, but was beyond all price.
Irene gave out little sign of what
She now intended. In the afternoon
As was her custom, she put on her wings
To fly the coasts about the Nilosyrtis;
She must have thought herself alone when she
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Plunged from ten thousand feet into the cliffs;
A party of schoolchildren saw her fall
And she was brought back broken to the city.
But when Hermione saw what had happened
She made them part about the bloody litter
And came and laid her head upon the head
Of this dead woman who had come to claim her.
Breath came then to her Voice. “Mother, come back.
I have forgiven you already. Come.”
And now Irene sighed and moved her eyes
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And so in time was healed of all her wounds.
What is the truth of stories such as this?
I tell it as it were a tale of motives,
Of a psychology half guessed, half given.
Better perhaps to have said such as this:
“Upon the twelfth Earth year of her indwelling
A woman dead or near to death was brought,
And by her words the Sibyl made her whole.”
So she began to speak. At first it was
A closing of the eyes, a little shudder,
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A smile of sweetest rapture in her face
And but a few words, undecipherable.
Sometimes the words were nonsense: “Coasts of form,”
Or “Going up,” or “See the violet green,
The edges, sugarloaves, the continents;”
Or she would stare for hours into a flower,
Or in the face of a beloved person,
Charlie perhaps, or Chance, or her Ganesh,
And they for her sake bore the scrutiny
As one endures a kitten’s choice to purr
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And claw you in its little rage of love.
But she would say “How lovely, lovely, lovely,”
And the bright tears of joy would fill her eyes.
And soon she came to tell of small events
That would befall tomorrow or the next day.
A china bowl painted with peonies
That had belonged to Gaea back on Earth
Was much beloved of Beatrice, and once
Hermione removed it carefully
From where it stood upon its wooden shelf.
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Next day the bad cat Mittens, trying to catch
A sunbeam, scrabbling, fell where it had been.
(This story came from Chance’s fiancée,
Rosie Molloy, who told it to their grandchild
Many years later, who then told it me.)
Chance says of her that when she closed her eyes
And breathed like that, she rose above the world
—Not just above the planet, but above
The very palings of the universe—
And saw its borders burn with green and gold
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And saw it whole, all creatures great and small
Each nested within each, like Chinese boxes,
And as a climber in a coastal range
Can see the richly colored bogs and channels
Of the lowlands that run off to the ocean,
She saw the many lands of various futures,
Divided by the cultivated fields
Of what is past and done, laid out to view.
“God fell into the world,” the Sibyl said,
“And this our home is but Her dreaming body.”
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“Why did She fall?” Chance asked when he heard this.
“To dream,” said she, as if it were a game.
“Why did She want to dream?” asked Chance. “Is God,”
She asked, “free or not free? first answer this.”
“Free.” “When you dream, can you control the dream?”
“No.” “Are you free in dreams, then?” “No again.”
“But if you did not dream, would you be free?”
“I do not see how this can be, but no.”
“Then to be free you must first learn to dream,
And dreaming is for us not to be free.
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And we must be God’s dreams, and set Her free.”
“Then we must be the prison of our God?”
Said Chance. “Yes. And the prison’s name is Being.”
“But newborn babies do not dream, they say.”
“A newborn baby is a fuzzy god.
It dreams that it might be, and might be free.”
“How many gods are there?” Chance asked at last.
“As many as dreams,” replied Hermione.
“How may there be both many gods, and one?”
“The one that fell,” she said, “since time had not
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Begun then, could not die; that god remains
A ghost beyond the living walls of nature.
The fallen one became the universe,
The lord of light, radiant stupidness,
And slept the drunken sleep of quantum physics,
Then woke enough to dream the dreams of matter;
And each dependency of engaged being,
Each organism patterned by its past
And governed by the shaping of its whole,
Being a dream, possesses its own god,
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Its hidden kami, or its genius;
And every living being has its spirit,
And every resonance of shape or function,
Thunder or ocean, fire or flowering spring,
Love as an Aphrodite, war as Mars;
Helios, Vishnu, Quetzal, Izanagi,
Enlil, Kavula, Gainji, Viracocha,
Each is a nisus in the play of time.
The artifacts that we have shaped to serve
Our purposes, our weapons and our tools,
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Our edifices, engines, arts and hearths,
Our quick computers with their eager minds,
Are gods, too, dreams of the fallen one.
And every human spirit is a god,
The divine baby promised in the gospel,
Until it falls into the world of death,
Of love, of act and of awakening.
For there is yet the Falling God, and She
Is the rainbow that floats upon the falls;
She is the resonance of all the dreams;
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She it is now who speaks this with my tongue
And breathes the meaning of awakening:
That the awakened is the dance of dreams,
The marriage-feast of all the petty gods.”
But these are always my words, and not hers.
I fear, I fear, what reader there may be
Will find only an eccentricity
Of thought, a flailing at an ancient gnosis
Now discredited, or else a sermon
By certain folk in other circumstances,
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Strangers with an unnatural emphasis.
Or else the words seem wicked, blasphemous,
The exploiters’ bald persistence in their crime;
Or if the revelation of the Sibyl be
Taken for what it is—the further gift
And new creation of the womb of time—
Then any screen that stands between her speech
And those she came to heal, is desecration.
But what I have is shreds and paraphrases,
Imperfect memories at second hand,
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And I must patch them to some kind of story
To make them mean what I divine they mean.
And now the very languages of Mars
And Earth are parting swiftly, so the verbs
Of hope for that world are, for this, despair;
And what would be abstract where life is known
Down to the last detail, would be, for those
Whose world is yet creating, concreteness
As fresh as water splashed upon your face
Some shining morning on Pavonis Mons.
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And that was where she made her shrine at last:
The Peacock Mountain, where a giant cleft
Pierces the towering hexagons of basalt
And forms an airy cavern a mile high;
And in the inner recess of the crack
They built her simple cells of fine cut stone.
A subterranean river foamed and rose
Here, in a torrent white as milk; and smoke
Went up from cedar fires upon the hearths
Tended by maidens of the Sibyl’s fane.
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The great computers of the Library
And those few ancient books that they had brought
Out of the Terran burning had been housed
Deep in the caves below; deepest of all
A subterranean ocean like a glass
Reflected darkness into darkness, but
Would blaze with crimson fire when shown a flame.
“Time, for the ancients,” once the Sibyl said,
In that sweet trance that lit her face like snow,
“Was as a circle turned back on itself,
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So that the years came back, and brought with them
The same bright freight of faces, beasts and stones,
The same colors seen by different eyes,
Same eyes, different colors, same colors.
They heard the hurdy-gurdy of the time
Bring round the caroltide, the rosy hymn,
And all souls knocked together in the bag,
The cozy gossip-hut of history.
Lo fortuna velut luna vol-
Vit et revolvitur. But the moderns
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Sprang a lonely tangent from the wheel,
And time lay out behind and on ahead,
And we were shackled to a fatal rail
That ran beyond the sight of family,
Beyond the memory of home, beyond
The last sweet old tune singing in our head.
All there was left was the swift wail of passage,
Hiss of the wheel against the vanishing steel.
The ancients never could escape the past;
The modems murdered it and then they grieved
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Because their present was become a ghost.
What shall we know of time, then? That the past
Is all that has lived on into the present;
Nothing is lost that was, the tense of past
Cannot endure the verb to be, and what
Is once is ever. The live and only past’s
The inside of the present, its unpacking
And its contents; as the water is
Of the new-spreading stream upon the desert,
Or as the sap is of the blossoming tree,
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Or as the seed that swells the lover’s gift,
Or as the milk that oozes from the bud.
Time is a tree whose roots are also branches,
Whose forked twigs form a globe of growingness.
The lace they make, by their outreaching flow
Of choices made or taken, branched where act
Collapses the wave-function to event,
And by the spaces that were paths not taken,
Will constitute the very shape of being.
“The ancients and the moderns knew the future
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As like a line laid out before our feet
That we must tread lest the frail calendar
Be unfulfilled and chaos come again.
But I say to you that there is no future
But that one which we make, and we are all,
Photons and stones and grass and beasts and folk,
Making it up, dreaming it as we go.
Take it, my beloveds, my brothers, sisters:
Freeness, the dark coal of void in God’s hand,
Wherewith She blinds Herself that She may see,
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The potion that She drinks, of real dreams.”
“Tell me,” said Chance, “Who drive the eyed wheel
Of my spirit, Tell me what were the dreams,
First, and in order, of the dreaming god?”
“First was the dream of possibility.
All chances that are first, that need no other
For their articulation, must so be
As not to thwart each other; those that did
Died before birth and never came to light.
The mightier probabilities
were those
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That sang in harmony together. Next
Followed the dream of nextness, what could be
Given what is. How to find room for all
The schedule-trees in all directions that
Stochastic play may find? Three open ways,
The air of space, breathed out; but algebra
Forbade another. Next, six inner ways
Coiled themselves into every point of space.
Still, there was pain, the gravid ache of math
Knowing its logic’s death and stretched limit.
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So time was born then in a burst of light.”
Afraid that the teachings of the Sibyl may be a tedious mystery to some of his audience, the poet in a more familiar style describes how Charlie and Ganesh populate the new world with animals. The occasion is taken to explore the workings of evolution and ecology, and such subjects as swans, flying, wings, the avian city, avian economics and avian ethics.
Scene ii:
Evolution and the City
Ah, very well. I have seen your poor eyes
Droop and wander, stray to your wristwatches.
And I too feel the air come thin, and gasp
In the bright environments of the mountain.
Let us return, for a short space of time,
To the warm villages down in the foothills,
Dinner and bedtime, cockcrow and afternoon.
I interrupt the discourse of the Sibyl!—
And I cry for our unworthiness, our weakness.
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Still we shall go back to the holy mountain.
It is a promise, understood between us.
But till we are prepared to reascend
The cliffs, let us go to and fro and see
How Charlie and Ganesh have broached the Ark
And let forth all the curious animals.
Most family-like to us, the vertebrates:
Elephas bearing his head’s gondola,
Bufo the toad, who bloats his moony toot,
The bustly cassowary, with slim toes,
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The teleosts, their scaled eyes set in bone,
The shad, the arched tunny, and the perch;
The pangolin, with her smart streamlining,
The salamander, who must work each foot
Out of a different idea; the shrew,
As swift and vicious as a village sneak,
The gentle cow, her eyes rimmed with kohl,
The heron, like a purple thundercloud
Seen across marshland in the setting sun;
Pissing against the odorous stump, the dog;
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The hummingbird who throws his huge helix
About the jacarandas and who leaves
A flash of green buzzing into your eyes;
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 28
