Of planetfall, and of his pilgrimage
Across the twilit and alive new world
To where the Peacock Mountain soared away
Into a pinkish sky. But we are near
The end of our long journey, and must hurry.
At last the pilgrim came into the presence
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Of that lady it was his oath to kill.
Chance was there with her, and his other cousins
Wolf and Irene; one who knew the cast
And motion of the elder Chance might trace
The family resemblance in them all.
At once the Sibyl knew who this man was,
With his red hair and Garrison’s long face.
Her mouth turned down with love and pity then,
And she spoke quickly, softly, to forestall
Her friends lest they be moved to shield her from him.
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“So you have come. Your name is Flavius,
And you are kin to us, and you are welcome.
We do not offer any violence,
But ask that you stay with us for a while,
Converse with us, come to know what we are,
And then decide what it is you must do.
How would it be if we might speak awhile
About the beautiful, of what it is
And how it serves the making of the world…?”
Now Flavius had a weapon in his coat,
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A handgun, cunningly disguised to look
And function as a little voice-recorder.
And as she spoke, almost against his will
He drew it forth and held it out toward her.
He could not take his eyes from her; her voice
Would seem to him the loveliest that there was,
And she was what all other things were for,
All other persons’ being strove to be.
What he would then have done we do not know.
For now Irene knew why he had come,
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And saw him point a weapon at her daughter.
At once her training in the martial arts
(The dark gift of her master Tripitaka,
The Sibyl’s father, murderer of Chance)
Caught up her body in its steel pavane,
And in a flying turn she spun herself
Against the wavering aim of the assassin.
It was his slowness in the Martian field,
Not yet acclimatized to the strange lightness,
That stumbled her, or he would be disarmed
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And no harm done, so many tears the less.
He did not know he’d let the weapon fire.
The crash was black and heavy in the room.
There was blood everywhere; Irene on
Her knees, sinking toward the floor; the Sibyl
With a great stain of red across her side,
Soaking the clean white garment that she wore.
A single shot had wounded both of them:
Irene in the throat, and fatally;
The Sibyl by the weaker ricochet.
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But now in blinded fury Wolf had flung
Himself upon the miserable man
Who, as it were a snake, had dropped his gun;
The Sibyl shrieked to rob him his revenge,
And Chance, who’d caught her, swaying, laid her down,
And tore Wolf’s fingers from the killer’s throat.
The Sibyl’s wound was bloody but not deep;
She led the mourners at the funeral
Of that unhappy lady whom she owed
Two lives, and who in turn had owed her two.
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Wolf’s madness did not pass for many weeks,
But in the end the Sibyl healed his soul.
Flavius got more mercy than he wished:
The Sibyl would not have him harmed, and Chance
Argued before the court that he had been
As if a soldier of a state at war,
And that it was not certain at that moment
If his intent had truly been to kill.
It was decided he should be sent back
To Earth, to make what covenant he might
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With his unhappy spirit; it was clear
That now he worshipped what he would have murdered,
And, for himself, wished nothing but his death.
Thus justice can be kind and mercy cruel.
For did the Sibyl know what he would find
When, after three years’ exile, he returned
To Earth and sought his home and family?
And if she did, what may that mean for us,
Who must—for who is wiser than the Sibyl?—
Be therefore privy to the inner work
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Of history, when history has meaning?
Did she thus choose this way to twitch aside
The curtain on the great dream of the God?
Is, then, the deepest meaning of the world
Not just or merciful, but beautiful?
So Flavius arrived at Devereux
At dusk on an exhausted autumn day,
The frost upon the long and rotted grass,
A red horizon between barren trees.
This is the last time we shall look upon
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This place, so let us bid a fit farewell.
He found the windows lit, the offices
Of the world church bright with activity,
But no sign of his father or his mother.
The lodge was empty, and it smelt of stone.
Upon inquiry Flavius discovered
That, sick of Devereux, which still reminded
Him of Gaea and the past, Garrison
Had moved with Bella to New Mexico
And opened up the ranch at San Luis Rey.
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Not wishing to announce himself before
He could explain in full what he had done,
And ask his father how his duty to him
Could so conflict with what he felt was right,
He did not contact anyone, and spent
The last night of his enormous journey
In a drab, clean hotel just west of Reading.
And in the evening of an endless day
Caught in the limbo of a single hour
As time-zones reeled away beneath the wings
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(Except for two hours in the terminal
At DFW, dozing upon
A row of seating greased with ancient sweat;
Waking at times to see the afternoon
Of Texas wane across the deep blue sky
Feathered with white cloud through the tinted glass),
He drove a rented car through falling sleet
Up the strange valley of the Rio Grande.
Sometimes the ice-fog cleared, the low sun glared;
In the last light the mesas were gigantic,
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Each with an altar-cloth of soiled snow;
Soon it grew dark; an Ecotheist preacher
Was all there was upon the radio.
Though no one heard his knock, the ranch was lit,
Uncurtained, with a blare of TV sound.
He tried the unlocked door and entered in.
The noise was coming from a backdoor room.
He pushed on through and this is what he saw.
A heavy Indian nurse, dazed out with penth,
But kindly-looking, sprawled before a screen.
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His mother sat up at a kitchen table,
Rocking herself from side to side as if
A mechanism with a battery
Governed a motion slowing gradually
Until its last reaction should be spent.
Flavius knew at once that she was mad.
He could not watch, and left the room unnoticed.
The living rooms w
ere uninhabited,
The lights left on, and in some disarray;
No fires burned in the great hearths, but warmth
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Poured dryly from the heating vents. A sound
From the old master bedroom caught his ear.
He turned the doorknob, opened up the door.
Two bodies swarmed upon the bed, one brown,
The other white. He thought at first that they
Were man and woman but a sort of count,
Of what was what, made it quite clear that both
Were males, and now he recognized his father,
And saw the other was an Indian boy.
As they became aware of him, and broke,
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And stood, attempting with the sheets to hide
The knowledge of his eyes, he reached across
And took a shotgun from the rack above,
And, with a kind of dull surprise, took aim,
And fired both barrels at his father’s body.
Would it be different if we had known
That in these last few months with young Ortiz
Garrison for the first time in his life
Had found the happiness that had escaped him?
That if his son had not returned, his lover,
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Tiring of this adventure, would betray him?
Is death the worst can happen to a man?
What if we knew that Flavius’s trial
Resulted in a brief and lightened sentence;
That with his care and love through many years
Bella got back her wits sufficiently
To play the cello as she used to do
Sitting beside the window in the scent
Of springtime in the lodge at Devereux?
That in the end Flavius would return
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To Mars and die in service of the Sibyl?
We return to the words of the Sibyl: how truth and goodness are but offshoots of beauty; of the nature of beauty, its reality, its mystical experience, its neurochemistry, its persuasiveness, its reflectiveness, its divinity, its presence in history. A hymn to beauty follows. The author, unable to finish the poem, is blessed by a vision of roses which brings home to him the meaning of the Sibyl’s teaching; and he is thus enabled to pass his conception on to another poet in the distant past.
Scene v:
The Roses
But then the story would renew itself,
As time does always, as after a sleep
The healthy body yawns, looks round, begins
To think about a bite for breakfast; as
The lover's ardor at a nape or ankle
Will, after trance, suffuse the world once more
With warm and lovely colors, delicate.
But we must strike out at an angle from
The self-renewing flow of mortal things
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That for a moment we may see their meaning
And set an end to this one course of time;
For endings are the pruning of the branch
That makes it bud, that makes the mystic flower.
“How do we know the truth,” the Sibyl said,
“Between two explanations, or a thousand,
Each with an equal claim to evidence,
Each with an equal logical coherence?
It is the beauty of that one which marks it
So that the scientist-philosopher
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Is in no doubt where our allegiance lies.
And if we would extract the seed, the essence
Of the truth, we must know the ways of beauty.
For beauty is the oneness of the tree
Of life with and within the tree of knowledge,
Its oversapience that makes it spring
To further budding as it mates itself;
And if that branchingness is all that is,
Then beauty is the secret name of being.
Consider how the plants and animals
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Blaze to their loveliest expressiveness,
The flower, the paroxysm of their song,
The ritual dance, the flash of scale or feather,
Just at the moment when they pass their being
Over to the following generation;
Thus beauty is continuance of time.
But sex does not produce a printed copy;
The being that is reproduced is neither
Copy nor monster, and the space between
Is what we mean by beauty, beautiful.
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Survival thus is nothing but transcendence.
“How may we know the good? Old Socrates
Who was my friend when I was Diotima,
Took his last drink because he asked a question:
Is an act good because the gods have willed it
Or do the gods will it because it’s good?
If good is but the power of the gods
We need no word for it and no concern
To find it out; it is what we can do
Because we’re not restrained from doing it.
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How then do the good gods know what’s good?
What was that light elusive Gautama
Preached of, behind the netveil of the eye?
That gentlest of friends, whose feet I bathed
With tears and myrrh, said that the good was Love,
And he in turn bathed his disciples’ feet.
What is it that we love, what draws our love?
Why do they paint my Krishna’s body blue?
The heart and inner seed of love is beauty.
When all commandments have been laid away,
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Being but parables to clothe the soul
Into her thalamus, her marriage-chamber;
When every strict accounting of her acts
Be rendered, stricken from the reckoning;
When every ‘why’ is answered;—there is left
But the one law, to love the beautiful.
“So truth and goodness are the first two leaves
That branch from the archaic stem of beauty;
Or better yet, the father and the mother
Are truth and goodness, but the heavenly child,
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That makes them what they are, and why they are,
Is the divine fruitfulness of beauty.
The two great revelations of the Earth
Were truth and goodness; now we hold the third,
The cornerstone rejected by the builders,
The thing we need another world to know,
The loveliness that is the seed of love.
As being is the outer form of truth,
And loving is the outer form of goodness,
Creating is the outer form of beauty.
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“Those who would be disposed to set it light
Say beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.
But all the universe is eyes, and ‘I’s,
And all that is is what those eyes behold.
Sensation is the densest form of being,
Perception is the concretest sensation,
Esthesis is the sharpest of perception.
The stone records the presence of a tree
By mass and by electromagnetism:
That is the tree’s whole being for the stone.
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The deer can know the tree by shape and color—
What to the stone would be ghosts invisible.
The boy who sees the tree as beautiful
Knows it so much more clearly than the deer
As does the deer more clearly than the stone.
The power his species wields to make such judgments,
Ratified by its mastery of Mars,
Enfranchises the vision of the boy.
Ten billion years the universe has labored
To see itself through our confirming eyes;
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That gaze must sum its being as beautiful.
“And what the mystics felt was nothing less
Than that totality, that radiance
Which is the god herself awakening
To dream herself to being in ourselves.
Whatever is the whole, the eye that sees it
Is ecstatic, and must find its proper place
Outside the boundary of all it sees;
And in its step back from the living edge
Of all that is, it grows another limb
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Upon the many-branched frontier of being.
The dendrites of the great tree of the brain,
Whose cortex is that single milkwhite rose,
The living metaphor of the whole world,
Glow into music as the vision stirs,
And their soft nodes distil a heady fragrance
That bells the skull a lanternful of light;
And the sweet bees of the cell vesicles
Carry the pollen to the pistilled axon;
And molecules of pattern never known
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Record the pregnant kiss of mothering.
The liquor of that consummation drenches
The forked and blossomed panicles of nerves,
And forms a mighty image in the eyes
And words of the illuminated seers,
The holy shamans and the inflamed saints.
That image is the trace or touch of God:
When they would represent it, it appears
As a mandala or the beating waves
Of a repeated chant; each circle is
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The new boundary of included time,
The new high water mark of consciousness.
Sometimes they sing it as an inner light;
For as the brute time-beater of the brain
Is mastered by the sun, an inner sun
Governs this new testament of time.
“I have taught how the world is acted through,
Performed by fiat of its symbiotes.
What brings them to their vote, their congregation?
What is the medium of their Amen,
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Affirmed participation in the game?
What could it be but beauty—harmony
Promising further, darker melodies,
Promising struggles to resolve the chord?
What is it but the ache of a suspense,
Before the covenanted union comes,
The drawing out of time from the bent bow,
That makes a doorframe for Arcadia?—
Beauty is thus the knitting-in of time,
That weaves a pattern from the wayward threads.
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“Beauty’s the meaning of the divine dream,
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 32
