Its principle, the personality
And mood of the great dreamer of the world.
If you would know her mind, then study beauty.
When we have gone out to the edge of things,
Questioned the very axioms of being,
Taken the world itself as that computer
Which stores all knowledge and predicts the future,
And asked the fatal question of the sphinx
Whose answer is the answerer itself—
160
What are you? What is your own end and future?—
Then we have entered in the house of beauty.
This can’t be proved. But here the world must crack,
Must grow another layer of itself,
Even to contemplate the question’s meaning.
Beauty is what we can affirm outside
All axioms, all rules of yes and no.
It is itself the leap of self-inclusion,
The dark glow of an affirmation deeper
Than any mandated by axiom;
170
The urge itself of axiomization
To make a pattern that can grow a mind.
Beauty is the beginning of the worlds,
The evolution of the life of being,
The melt that crystallizes into meaning.
“That crystal is the hierarchy of being,
Whose meaning is its very history.
But as a perfect scale must still be broken
To make a melody and spin a time,
As spring must take the frozen forms and melt them,
180
And laughter must succeed to tragedy,
So every harmony and every structure
Are but the raw materials of beauty.
Although no message can be sent or taken
Without a medium whose shape is clear,
A perfect carrier-wave conveys no message,
And time without a difference must cease.
That which was once the union of the meaning
With its embodiment in act and form
Becomes the medium itself of a new gospel:
190
Hierarchy broken for a richer hierarchy.
That fierce subsumption, as a fire or feast,
That transubstantiation of the old,
Is beautiful, and is the tragedy
And the metabolism of the world.
When that which is, is that which ought to be,
The mountains of the world are beaten flat,
And nothing moves, having no place to go.
This is a true paradox, that that which is
Ought not indeed be that which ought to be.
200
“Then ought we simply to accept the flow,
Make no demand for a consistency
That must be shattered by the rush of time?
This is the last temptation, to be quiet,
Be wise, seek not to know the whole;
To play the little games time offers us,
A life just of sensations, not of thoughts.
But then there should be nothing great to die,
We should deprive the world of tragedy,
And everybody would be tourists, passing
210
Through countrysides whose villages are empty,
Void of committed dwellers in this life;
The gamblers would have cashed in all their chips,
Put on their hats and headed for the exits,
Gods with no mortals to play the game of Troy.
Time grows by means of the attempts to halt it,
And freedom is the crash of an achieved will
Into the fulfillment of its denial.
Beauty is violence, incipience,
And transience, the lovelier for what
220
Is sacrificed in that rich wastefulness.
Beauty is breathtaking and sometimes cruel,
And would be evil were it not worth all
We sacrifice so that we might endure it.
There is no afterlife; eternity
Is an intenser form of time that strikes
Out at right-angles from an entire life .
And knows as many tenses more, and moods,
As we do than the immemorial beasts.
Time must be dammed to make this current flow;
230
Light blazes from the point of the resistance.
“Chance my great-grandfather hurled all his being
Against the tendency of history;
My father Tripitaka, in the faith
That time could be denied, did murder him;
He in his own time slew himself that we
Should get a life he served but could not share;
Great-grandmother Gaea lived a life that I
Declare as excellent, as sacrificed
To freedom as our own conquistadors.
240
Charlie would kill a world to give it birth;
Ganesh could tickle dead things into life.
Wolf and Irene never found their love,
Yet were transformed by loss to singing birds;
Beatrice made a garden from the death
Of her own inner garden with its seeds.
My brother Chance might have been president
Of this republic; he served me instead.
All knew that life is hungry as a flame:
Even that man who lately sought my life
250
Was faithful to a thing that defied time.
“The world-dream of the god is history,
Whose inner meaning is the joy of dying,
The flash of light on wheat, on clouds, on eye,
That dies the moment that it has its being.
Why should we in our fear of tragedy
Reserve our gift to beauty lest it die?
The grief of suffering is the melody
The goddess sought to be enfranchised by.
The holiest unworldliness is this:
260
To love the world and die upon its kiss.
Truth is a dab of scent a girl put on
You catch upon a lit spring afternoon.
Truth is a ripple on piano keys,
Wind in the leaves, moonlight on fruit trees.
Our cunning sells our birthright for a song—
Eternity so brief and life so long.
Give all you have to history, because
All paradise is here and always was.”
And this would be the ending of the story
270
Had I disposed material more fitly
To the first chosen and constraining form:
So law may force on us unchosen freedoms.
To tell the truth, I had run out of things
To say; as the task neared its conclusion
(Which was to be a summons to my world
To take up once again the glory road)
I fell into despair, which was the deeper
The more I praised the destiny of Mars.
What was there left for my own ruined planet?
280
I could compose no more, and the long weeks
Of sodden fall went by, and I was dazed
And sleepy like a sickly child, and dreamed
Profusely, strange weary meaningless dreams.
The last weekend of Fall it was my turn
To get the writers’ co-op car to drive.
I was in luck. It was a lovely day,
Almost like spring, smelling of earth and sea.
I drove up the Taconic to the lakes:
Some of the suburbs are inhabited,
290
And the old black folk had put on a display
Of Christmas decorations, shiny red
And green, and angels and a plaster crèche.
Though in the broad daylight it was tawdry,
It moved me; in a kind of aching joy
I drove on into the deep country
side
And stopped beside a tangled entryway
Where a thick wild scent had attracted me.
So picking briers from my hair and clothes
I walked along what must have been a drive,
300
And the cold fragrance grew as I limped on.
It was a great old mansion—built, perhaps,
To be the homestead of a stockbroker—
And it was heaped and overgrown with roses,
Sprays, drifts, mountains of crimson blossoms,
Bursting through windows and half-opened doors,
Climbing the chimneys and the buckled eaves.
Some hardy strain, most likely, with its roots
Deep in a septic tank, southern exposure.
The savage perfume almost knocked me out;
310
But what was strangest was to know these flowers
As if they never had been cultivated,
As if they never bore the name of roses,
As if they were the most natural of plants,
As if their scent were like the bark or mould
Of any woodland passing into winter.
How lovely was the wild scent of this flower!
Were not all human things as natural,
Was not all history as sweet as this?
When I returned I read the Sibyl’s words
320
And saw at once another meaning in them.
She had been thinking of us after all,
Even the lost ones in our land of shadows:
There was a path that such as we might follow.
I had believed I must be miserable
In my ill health, and clogged with enemies,
Discouraged by the State so very gently
The hero juices never learned to flow:
I have no testament to make of prison camps,
Gaunt intellectuals with fiery eyes,
330
Or deaths beneath the clubs of the police,
So that resistance to this kindly pressure
Seems the ungratefulness of a spoiled child.
(When it is less important I will tell
The game of cat and mouse and quiet betrayal:
But paranoia, even justified,
Is not as interesting to the reader
As to the author—and quite rightly so:
It is a sickness the authorities
Use to contain the struggles of the prey.)
340
But now I saw I always had been happy.
I had my task, my manuscript; so what
Could they do to me that they had not done,
Stealing the copies, making sure my friends
Did not get their promotions or their raises,
Letting me always know I was observed?
What was dispiriting was being so near
The end of all those labors, and the moment
When I must think upon my death in this
To me so foreign and so false a land.
350
And all the time, the Sibyl seemed to say,
As I transcribed but did not hear her words,
I had been serving history; I was
The worn stone in its stream that turns its course,
That multiplied by many, makes the mountain
That causes it to flow at all. Freedom
And freedom’s soul, the all-creating beauty,
Attended me, and made my labors rich.
If modest talents and a faulty ear
So flawed the work that it would never stand
360
Beside the giants of the Earth’s wild past,
Yet this might be the best, because the only
Epic of protest in our darkening glide;
And so the opportunity of hope
Never is absent while time yet endures.
But what was I to do now it was over?
Polish, revise of course. There have been those
Who’ve worn away a mighty oeuvre that way,
And should be quite content to start again.
But that would surely be, considering
370
The heroes of my tale, who never let
Revision dally in the way of action,
A counter-imitative kind of fallacy,
Hypocrisy before the gates of being.
No. For the roses, their solstitial blood
Casting a haze of incense on the thickets
Naked of all but a few rattling leaves,
Trailing their veil, fragrant, invisible,
Across the hillsides, now reminded me
Of that bright cave distant by so much space,
380
By such an unimaginable cold,
Where a girl-Sibyl, pretty in her curls,
Preached how the universe was yet so young,
How all this was a prologue to the play.
This manuscript will perish when I die
Or when the earnest guardians of our good
Find it and give it to the cleansing flames;
But there may be another poet, perhaps
No better gifted than myself, who will,
By that communication poets know,
390
Speak it again in quite another form.
Perhaps he has already, or she has—
For why should not the conversation pass
Both ways across the anterooms of time?—
Perhaps the time I live in fades so fast
Because its sap has gone to feed a future
Turned by the least new budding to a way
I cannot dream. Is there a kind of music
In the long story of these men and women
Whose ending may transfigure its beginning,
400
Bury the teller in the telling? Listen.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface (2011 Edition)
Introduction
Dramatis Personae
Chronology
General Summary of the Story
Genealogy
Act I: The Origins of the War
Scene i: The Capture of Chance
Scene ii: Gaea and Garrison
Scene iii: Ganesh, Charlie, Beatrice
Scene iv: Sumikami
Scene v: Tripitaka
Act II: The Trial of Chance
Scene i: The Gathering of the Prisoners
Scene ii: The Fashioning of the Comet
Scene iii: The Trial
Scene iv: The Fall of Chance
Scene v: The Death of the Comet
Act III: The Mutiny of the Gladiators
Scene i: Tripitaka and Garrison
Scene ii: The Olympic War
Scene iii: The Coming of Tripitaka to Mars
Scene iv: The Colony
Scene v: The Seductions of Garrison and Tripitaka
Act IV: The Gardening of Mars
Scene i: Wolf and Irene
Scene ii: The Battle for the Codex
Scene iii: The Fate of Tripitaka
Scene iv: The Birth of the Sibyl
Scene v: The Garden
Act V: The Words of the Sibyl
Scene i: The Sibyl's Awakening
Scene ii: Evolution and the City
Scene iii: The Tree of Life
Scene iv: The Passing of Gaea
Scene v: The Roses
Colophon
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 33
