Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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The Martians made new rituals of love,
Ships of enacted practice that might carry
The tempered soul through the cold wastes of time.
The children saw their parents as their heroes
But in their time took up the fired quest;
And learned to laugh at their own child-desires
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And learned to make a gift that might well match
The huge gift their parents gave to them.
Such was the education the young lovers
Rosie Molloy and Chance, who hand in hand
Wandered the vales of this Arcadia,
Or soared about the shining precipices
Of Olympus Mons, such was the teaching
They must have found out somehow for themselves.
(A practical joker, Molly had the Sight,
And Chance could never get enough of her.
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They married, had a dozen red-haired children,
And ran an artist’s colony for years
In a big growing house cloned from an oak.)
One last lesson from the city of birds.
Despite the fractal modeling of weather
Within Ganesh’s subtle cores of logic,
The Martian storms are violent, unexpected.
Death in the air is but a part of life,
For who’d forgo the ecstasy of flying?
And so this city makes old Death a guest
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And does not fear him when his dark cloak blows.
We are shown the Sibyl’s home in a mountain cave, and hear her words on the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the creation of the world; and on incest, marriage, the sexes, death, immortality, and evil.
Scene iii:
The Tree of Life
I cannot give the names, but there are those
Who knowing of my work have aided me
In secret, letting me use the uplink
Scrambled in tightbeam to evade detection;
And thus I had the chance to interview
Some who had heard from parent or grandparent
Personal histories about the Sibyl.
The Martian language has diverged from ours
And I must labor to make out the sense;
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It has a wildness in the vowel sounds,
A bold and archetypal stress of meaning,
A diacritic tremor in its syntax
Reminiscent of the ancient Greek.
But I would always ask, What was it like
To have a private audience with the Sibyl?
And the accounts differed so strangely, I
Found I was dreaming her in my own fashion,
Given no single image to tie down.
The pilgrim, having labored up the slopes,
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Prepared in spirit and bathed in the pools
Of effervescent water from the springs,
And having made his gift to the priestesses,
Would come into a pleasant chamber in
The rock, with a great window open on
The plains and distant estuaries of Mars.
A scent of cedar smoke, and something else,
Some light narcotic like the smell of wine
That floats about an altar, or like incense,
But more astringent, cleaner, filled the place,
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Together with the distant sound and odor
Of icy waters pouring through their caves.
Sometimes she would be waiting; sometimes one
Of her dear comfortable friends was there,
Ganesh, or Charlie with his pipe, or else
Her two mothers, Irene and Beatrice,
Who spoiled her like an unexpected child,
Or Wolf, who teased her, or her favorite, Chance;
Sometimes she would come in alone and speak,
Briefly and terribly, her eyes distant,
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So that you knew you must, on peril of
Some mischance of the soul, consider well
The oracle she spoke, and carefully
Do the clear good and avoid the evil.
Sometimes she was your closest counselor,
Like the best and most understanding friend
You ever had; or a conspirator,
Laughing with you about the big surprise.
Sometimes—if this can be believed—she was
An old cartoon character, Betty Boop,
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With curls, a pretty figure, and a squeak;
And only something strange about the eyes,
The milky pallor, and the fearful grace,
Would tell you, you must heed all that she said.
“The tree of life,” she said, “Is always branching.
Its three-way joint, fixed past and open futures,
Is all it needs to make a universe.
If we pry close enough to pierce the grain
Of space and time, the edge of the most small,
Out of that ground of emptiness there shoot,
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Like forked buds, positive and negative,
The credit and the debit particles
Whereby the balance of the world is drawn;
And from the primal superforce there springs
First gravitation, then the strong and weak,
And last, our sweet electromagnetism.
The radiant energy of the beginning
That sought at first simply escape, would branch
A new species of itself, that which spun
And tied its probabilities together
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And said again in one place what it said
Before: this was the birth of bonded matter.
Inside the stars it grew into the forms
Of elemental heavy nuclei,
And one great branch of matter cooled and set
Until its elements became a language
And a printing-press to publish what
We read as the compounded, polymered
Or ringed or dancing forms of chemistry.
But matter groaned beneath the tyranny
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Of causal laws and that long wearing out
Of order to decay by which it paid
To get a place and an identity.
The god, whose dream it was, yearned to be free,
And freedom is the inverse of decay.
That which is free is not exempt from law,
But in obeying makes itself new laws,
So that its future state is more determined
By what itself enacted than by what
The world’s old laws demand that it enact.
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Thus certain chemistries and turbulences
Govern themselves, dict their own future state
More sharply than whatever calculator
Might be conceived to do so, and more swiftly.
That which is free has more space to survive,
And populates more branches of the tree;
And time itself was branching higher tenses
Wherein the richer systems might be free.
The richest chemistry of all was life,
The branch of branches, and the tree of trees.
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And each new branch was wiser than the last
And could consult its own past history
With more reflexion than its ancestors,
As Fibonacci numbers grow, containing
All their past generations in themselves.
(Their golden ratio delights the sense
Of humankind in pattern or in tone.)
And so the tree of life became transformed
To the tree of knowledge; that change was sealed
By the self-shaping of the human race.
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We are the bees by which the living world
Will fertilize itself across the voids;
; We are the eye by which the pyramid,
The Yggdrasil of time, may know itself.”
It happened at that time Ganesh was present,
And it was he who asked the hardest questions.
“Sweetheart,” (sometimes this was what he called her)
“Isn’t the tree of knowledge opposite
In shape, habit of growth, and operation
To the tree of life? Logic, for instance;
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It doesn’t grow new stems or twigs or branches,
But fits together old ones in a fork:
Major premise, minor premise, conclusion,
Or the transistor’s input, gate, and output.
If you mean “knowledge” in the Bible sense,
It’s still a fusion, not a fissioning:
Momma and Poppa join to make a baby.
How does the tree of life reverse itself?”
“Yes,” said the Sibyl softly, “My dear toad,
That is exactly how it comes about.
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How wise of you. The little crotch or lambda
Of which the world is made, only at first
Opened toward the future. Now it points
Both to the future and the redeemed past,
Or plays the caret to insert a gloss.
You ask the Sphinx’s test, whose answerer,
The three-legged one, was he whose feet were nailed
Together on the mountain, that he might
Not know himself to be the riddle’s answer.
Time is its own reversing, and its cross;
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The life of knowledge is the life of life,
The branches are the rooting of the roots…”
We know the look on old Ganesh’s face;
The ecstasy of the intelligence,
The urge to know and question, the excitement
Of being where the mental action is.
All prophets of the past, all the messiahs,
Wise women, Zen seers, Huichol spirit-dons,
Even the kindliest Hasid, would take
The opportunity to put him down,
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To cut the gawky stalks of human reason.
But Ganesh knew that he could trust his friend,
And questioned her again: “So you are saying:
To know the world is how to make it grow?”
And she, so gentle: “Dear old toad, you know it.
You bring the world to life with your own gismos.
The elder law would curse you for your knowledge;
But I say to you, you are of the blessed.”
Ganesh, though, wouldn’t be put off by this.
“If when we know, we know our ancestors;
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If knowing is a kind of generation;
Doesn’t that make it incest when we know?”
“To see, with Ham, the nakedness of Noah,”
Murmured the Sibyl in her prophecy:
“That in the ancient law was to be cursed
And be an unclean Canaanite, a slave.
But every marriage is incestuous:
We are all sprung from Eve. Even to tell
The story of the curse is to be cursed.
We must all serve each other then, and be
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Clean baptized in the fluids of corruption.
The kingdom of heaven is like a seed,
A yeast, a ferment; and if God is love,
Consider how impure a thing is love:
How much akin to ours is the warm skin
Of wife and husband; how our love makes out
The brotherhood and sisterhood we share,
And those dear members, how we generate,
Are strangely matched analogies, the hers
And his; and how your lover’s selfhood is
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The naked mouthskin of your own enfleshment.
I am the Sibyl, and my father’s mother
Was a whore; her mother was a whore.
Disciple, you have taught me not to bless;
The better blessing is the oldest curse.”
But Chance was also there, with his son Liam;
And he now asked if it was her intention
To set aside the ancient laws of incest.
“Let there be new laws,” said the Sibyl then;
“Not to forbid the marriage of the kin,
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But to command the choice of fertile strangers.
How may we know the strangeness of ourselves
Without encountering the very other?
The sin of incest is not in pollution
But in the choice of safety over risk.
It is the sin of the promiscuous,
Who shapes each lover in the image of
His own inviolate sterility.
Love is a venture into foreign ground,
A hazard of the precious germs of life,
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A finding of your sister where you might
Not have expected it, at the world’s end;
And only thus is the world bound together.
There have been many teachings of the love
Of neighbors, and the love of man for man,
Of sisterhood, of parent and of child,
But there has never been till now a teaching
About the love of woman for a man,
The love of man for woman; such a love
Was only dignified as sign or image
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Of marriages more mystical and holy.
But now I say to you all other unions
Are but a symbol of the marriages
That men and women make between themselves.
Let there be few of them, lest they be common.
Let them be judged as justly as the world
May judge them in its most envious censure;
And for the rest, let there be only mercy.”
“If then it is the difference,” said Chance,
“That makes the lovers perfect in their love,
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What is the difference of men and women?”
At this the Sibyl smiled and looked at him
Under an eyebrow, but he held his peace,
And presently she answered soberly.
“The selfhood of a living being,” she said,
“Is in its origin and essence female.
What makes the difference between the thought
Of a cold stone and a warm animal—
Even between a wisp of ash, of oil, of gas,
And the green plant or germ that feeds upon it—
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Is that the life is she, is feminine,
Conserves intact her selfskin membrane, keeps
A clean environment within her walls,
Feeds, senses, knows herself after what fashion
The depth of her inheritance dictates,
Learns and creates her organs or her tools,
And buds and nurtures copies of herself.
And now began the great experiment:
A second mood of being was posited,
Whose composition risked the species-life.
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It was a distillate of femaleness,
With one more chromosome, an almost cancerous
Effundence of those hormone chemistries
That make the female sharply what she is:
This was the origin of the male gender.
If female is the mark distinguishing
The living organism from the dead,
The organismic from the mechanistic,
Then male is the fierce mask the female makes
To test and to adventure what she is,
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A tragic and extreme exaggeration,
A taxing of her metabolic limits,
Always in danger of returning to
The automatic, the impersonal,
As if the armor might become the man.
The sickly flowering of femaleness,
The burning through of sex into the monster
That may once in a thousand years give birth
To one so beautiful she is the mother
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Of a whole race of new living beings.
“And with the male came death. For till that moment
Each species was immortal or extinct,
And every parent was her progeny,
And every sister was a twin so close
That each one was the same identity.
Maleness entailed the individual life,
The alienate, the novel point of view,
The unique package of reshuffled genes.
But now this clumsy hazard of the male
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(Sowing dissension in the sisterhood,
Making the self no longer mean the same),
Required a leveler of generations,
A scythe to reap the entwined wheat and tares,
That the next season only the good seed
Should be implanted in the field of time.
And so our death is written in our cells,
Its black letters spell our consciousness.
It was with this lethal inoculate
That the wise female injected herself;
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And thus the goddess woke to dream more deeply
And know herself through the inflaming venom,
The snake-secreted madness of the male.”
“Then death,” said Chance, “has got a special meaning.
Of what advantage is it that we die?”
“Yes,” said Ganesh, “I’ve always thought it crazy
The more evolved an organism is,
The more unquestionably it will die.
We die more definitely than a rat,
Who’s got his species-life to fall back on;
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A rat more than an ant, who’s just a cell
In the nest, and an ant more than a virus.
And rocks and such don’t even die, they just
Like wear away; and protons last as close
To forever as you get, except photons,
Which don’t wear out at all. So what’s the story?”
The Sibyl smiled. “As bad as it can be.
Consider this: if humans are more mortal
Than the animals, and if our death
Is that which marks us as the more divine,
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The gods must be more mortal than ourselves.
Death is the best survival strategy.
Survival is continuance in time;
And if we want the immortality
Of photons, we already, surely, have it—
Light is the stuff of which our flesh is made,
And of itself it cannot ever die.