It is our souls that die, that go to sleep
Each night, and are reconstituted in
The altered matter of our morning bodies,
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That pass away as every present moment
Gives way and life and breathing to the next.
A dying soul in an immortal body:
This is the truth we see if we would cling
To immortality in the old law.
“Now we are ready for another law.
All creatures are creators of the time
They have their being in, and if that being
Permits no space for others (as a hadron
Excludes its sisters from its place and tone)
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Then in that space it shares no limit, and
May well be called immortal in its time.
Such are the basest entities, immortal.
The higher beings are more sensitive
And share the complex times they generate,
And with respect to after and before
Are bounded by the surfaces they share
With one another, knowing and being known.
Their boundaries are thus their deaths, and thus
The sacrifice of love they make to share
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Their universe with other sentient things.
For since reality is concrete only
As all of its participants are sensed
And registered by each, and each by all,
Death is our gift of being to the world.
“If immortality is in that gift,
Survival in a law above the law,
A living in the conversation of
The world, beyond the meaning of your death,
Such that the minds of others bear your mind,
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And you embody spirits from the past—
It will require the gift of all you are,
And stands or falls by each of us, for each
Is to himself a very universe.
The kingdom of heaven is indeed at hand,
Not there, or after, but at hand, as one
Might take a pencil from a tabletop.
That kingdom is indeed a mustardseed,
That kingdom is a leaven in the world.
The time of that familiar place is always
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Out at a right-angle from the old time;
It is what joins all old times back together.
Oh my dear friends, all Paradise is here,
It’s here in this room, as close as childhood,
Close as the death we die all the more swiftly
The closer that we share each other’s souls.”
Now all this time Irene had been there,
The Sibyl’s mother, but had kept her silence.
But now she raised her head and looked upon
Her daughter, whose own being she had willed,
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Once, to have cancelled, to have rendered void,
And murmured softly (we could hardly hear):
“Sibyl, in none of what you say to us
Is anything of wickedness. But how
Are we, who live in the grip of the world,
To take the malice in ourselves and others?
You’ve said that evil is the shade of good,
A shadow cast by some mere privateness
That makes privation of the light and being.
But is there not an evil, active, clever,
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Seeking out ways to do another harm?
Aren’t there demons in the human soul
That seek the innocent and would destroy them,
That smear and tire the noble and the great?
You give us lovely good philosophies:
What can you say to us about the evil?”
A tear stood in the Sibyl’s eye; the cave
Seemed to darken as if all might be lost.
“Ah yes, these things are still to come to pass,”
She muttered, almost to herself. “So be it.”
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But then the Sibyl smiled, began again.
“My dearest friends. Any philosophy
That makes a place for evil is in love
With it a little, and permits its franchise.
Might not the matter be misplaced?—evil
No subject for philosophy at all,
Not even a true noun or adjective;
Only a preposition to denote
What you should fight even unto your death?
—And if it is not that, then it’s not evil
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And therefore should not overmuch concern us:
A nothing that receives its shape and being
Just from its names, from the opinion of it.
Were it not better to prepare yourself
As, so they say, my father did, in strength
And skill of soldierhood, so when it comes
You slay it if you can and obtain merit
(And if it is not that, then it’s not evil)?
Why should it be more complicated in
Itself, interesting, sophisticated?
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Why should we give it house-room in our souls?”
Perhaps as a demonstration of the truth of the Sibyl’s last strange sayings about the nature of evil, the poet interrupts her words for the last time to give a swift and impatient account of the fates of Gaea and Garrison.
Thus, after a long sickness Gaea dies. Garrison, in deference to what he falsely believes to be her last wishes, sends Flavius his son to murder the Sibyl. Flavius comes to Mars in the guise of a pilgrim, but in the presence of the Sibyl he hesitates to use his weapon. Irene in an attempt to disarm him is herself killed; the Sibyl is wounded. But she pardons the assassin, and he returns to Earth. Finding his mother distracted to madness by neglect, Flavius slays his father Garrison in the arms of a lover.
But for a few brief references in Act V, scene v this is the last we see of Beatrice, Charlie, and Ganesh. Their work and destiny are unfinished: they are woven into the future construction of the planet Mars. Likewise, the poet does not tell this in the poem, but in 2068, shortly after the assault upon the Sibyl’s life, the old nurse Sumikami passes away at the age of a hundred years, leaving the room of the poem and the world as unobtrusively as she entered it.
Scene iv:
The Passing of Gaea
Turn then once more to the dark vale of shadows,
To this Earth with its manacles of mass.
But when I speak of it after such fashion,
My heart twists within me, with loyalty,
With love for all this planet once has been
And still may be, and, in that part of nature
Which never did condemn itself, is now.
Lately I walked the streets of old Manhattan
In the bright fall weather of Indian summer;
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Under my overcoat the bulky wad
Of an early draft of this manuscript
Intended for a place beneath the floorboards
Of an old friend’s apartment; my arthritis
Gives me a limp that usefully disguises
The awkwardness of errands such as these.
It’s not my purpose to discuss myself—
An epic poet ought to be a drudge
In service of his brilliant agonists—
But it was just that kind of autumn day
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That makes you love your life on any terms,
With the big planes and maples of the Village
Casting a shade of orange on the sidewalk
Brighter, it seems, than the navy blue sky;
And though the air is cold, a summery breath
Will swim up from the warmed fronts of the brownstones
Sharp with the brewed smell of fallen leaves.
So I must tell the history of Gaea
And her son, and her son’s
son Flavius,
That the tale be completed, and my work over.
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We shall return once more to Mons Pavonis,
To the Peacock Mountain on that planet
So very far away, that living dream,
To hear the Sibyl speak of the divine beauty;
But stay now for a while upon the Earth.
When Gaea heard about the Lima Codex,
And how her victory was snatched away,
She wept, and Garrison, who was nearby,
Came and perceived what he had never seen
In twenty years, his mother’s flowing tears;
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And she looked up and saw him, and her heart,
In rage at her detection by her son,
Seemed to turn inside out, and like a fish,
Beat with a quiver and a spasm on
The inside of its bowl; a pain so huge
It was grotesque, it would be funny
It was so out of all proportion, struck
At breast and arm, and felled her to the floor.
But Gaea’s constitution was as strong
As the burned stump that puts forth year by year
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A clutch of virid leaves in frosty spring;
And though the artery that serves the heart
Was knotted with the plaques of decayed passion,
And all the muscle of its forward face
Was scars and spongy lesions, she survived.
Garrison now became her nurse; he sought
By this to mitigate his guilt for her.
In doing so he must ignore his wife:
He treated her as if she were not there,
And scarcely recognized his little son.
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And Bella in her loyalty grew thin
And sickly pale, neglectful of her music,
Scattered, distracted in her manner; even
Eccentric, so that little Flavius
Sometimes could not predict what she might do.
The boy, though, in the fineness of his spirit,
That idealism that must seek a hero,
Only admired his father all the more,
Falsely believing that his empty silence
Betokened expectations stern and noble,
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Tacit acknowledgement of manly duty.
Now Gaea’s doctors thought she would soon die,
But she would live another twenty years.
We can adjust to certain times of strain
If we believe they soon will have an ending;
But Gaea would not die, she plain refused
To give the colonists that satisfaction.
And Garrison must feed her, change her bed,
Take her for little walks about the grounds,
Listen to her increasingly fantastic
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Plans for the redemption of the Earth
From the great insult we had offered her;
And as the years went by, her kidneys failed,
And she lived every moment of her life
In a great bedroom crammed with furniture,
Steeped in the childhood urine smell, where once
She and her Chance had wrestled in their love.
And Garrison became inured to it,
And could see nothing strange in what he did;
But on occasion he would disappear,
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Leaving her in the care of a hired nurse,
To find relief in certain degradations.
And Bella bore it all, would not complain;
And Flavius grew up without a father
But worshipping the absence as an ikon.
There came a day, springtime at Devereux,
When Gaea felt a new force in her body,
And sat up in her bed, a wattled creature,
Now fat to monstrousness, but beautiful
No less about the eyes and lips; she stood,
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Swaying and sighing, on enfeebled legs.
Garrison moaned about her, begged her humbly
Back to her bed, not knowing which was worse,
To force her or to let her have her way.
She did not understand the thing that drove her;
It was a joy, a strength that she remembered
From her long past political juvescence;
Seeking a meaning for her mood, as always,
Rose the impetuous, she chose to make
Her gesture as a mission to her son.
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“Garrison, stop that noise and listen to me.
I want a promise from you, then I’ll go
Quietly back to bed, as good as gold.
There is a prophet or a leader now
Upon the planet of the naturekillers.
Some say it is a witch, descended from
Your own guilty stock and ancestors.
I shall die soon of grief, that they have wrought
The great pollution despite all I’ve done;
I want you to avenge me, or if you
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Are too afraid and old and weak to do so,
To send your son about my business.
Kill her, or else my death is on your head.”
What could he do? He made his wretched promise,
And she, after a stagger to the window,
That she might see the flowering crabapple,
Sadly unpruned but pink with buttery sweetness,
Went docile back to bed and was tucked in
As if she were a naughty little girl.
A few hours after this, poor Garrison,
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Who thought this was another of her scares,
Threatening death while she greenly endured,
Departed on a little quiet excursion.
But while he was away, a miracle
Seemed to envelop Gaea’s dying body.
That joy within her grew, and now at last
She understood its true and inner meaning.
It was not, as she’d thought, her ancient courage,
To fight against the demons of her cause,
But something strangely opposite, the gift
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Of a forgiveness, even of a love
For all her enemies, a creamlike calm
That smelt of apple-blossom and blue sky.
And now at last she felt the cruel grip
Of life relax itself upon her body,
And sent for Garrison, that at the last
She might rescind the terrible commission
She laid on him; but he could not be found.
Still, in a state of blessedness and peace,
As true salvation as one might desire,
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One night, attended only by her nurse,
Just as the apple scent gave way to may,
To flowering hawthorn, Gaea passed away.
When Garrison returned and she was dead,
He went a little mad. He calculated
What he was doing when she died, imagined
Her despair and final loneliness,
Knew that his only chance for peace was gone,
But set himself the sterner to obey
Her last behest to him, of her revenge.
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Flavius was called from university,
And stood, tall and red-headed in a coat,
At graveside in the weed-grown cemetery,
While many hundred of the core elite
Within the Ecotheist faith, who marched
With Gaea in the glory days of change
And triumph in the quiet revolution,
Heard the Commissioner himself pronounce
The words of burial, farewell, and welcome
For the dead back to her namesake’s home.
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To understand what followed, we must know
How Flavius constructed his life story
Out of what piece
s time had given him.
As Ecotheism matured, it lost
The gaunt and strange excesses of its youth,
The flights of a Ruhollah or a Cade
(That popular fanatic who advised
Sterilization for the human species),
And Penth became quite as respectable
As English tea, and about as exciting.
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But now the Church took on the force of time,
And Flavius felt for it as Frenchmen might
Hearing the Marseillaise, or British workers
Feel for the Red Flag, or Americans
For yellow ribbons, hot dogs, fourth July.
His father was the hero of his myth,
A grim and distant bearer of the faith,
The paradigm of moral probity.
And thus when Garrison proposed his plan
Later upon the day of funeral,
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Flavius felt the dull glow of election,
A dedication to that chosen torment
Which spins the paltry story of a man
Into a thread so tight it cannot break,
Into a garment that will stand when he
Who wears it has outstayed the dying flesh.
“I cannot go; I am too old, I would
Be recognized, I would stand out among
The young illegal emigrants; but you
Might plausibly find out a skyslave runner
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And get a ship to Mars. It was her wish,
And I must lay it on you as a duty.”
“Father, I understand. This is what you
Prepared me for, what I was waiting for
Through all these years. It is as well that you
Never were close to me, nor I to you;
It would have been unbearable if we
Had lived as ordinary people do,
Who are not called to overriding duties.
But I’m afraid for Mother. She’s not strong.
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Promise you will support her when I’m gone.”
This was the kind of person that he was.
It would be tale enough for many poems
To tell how Flavius could penetrate
The underground of Martian sympathizers
And find the right connection for a ship
That, creaking, shuttled emigrants above
The atmosphere into a low earth orbit;
How he must fake the sale of all his goods
In payment for the new life in the stars;
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How the great treeship docked against the shuttle;
How border guards were tipped off to avoid
That sector, how a leaky pressure seal
And viral blight had almost killed them all;
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 31
