"Fate, thou earnest before all the gods,
Thou wast prepared in the mists long before any creation,
Nakedness thou of the clouded beginning, and true
To self alone, the cold, all-penetrating form.
Creation and Creator thou in one,
At once occurrence and knowledge and meaning,
The force of thy nakedness penetrates god and man
Commanding the Created.
Upon thy command the god delivered himself
From his inexistence and became Father,
Calling the name of light out of muteness,
From the womb of the primeval, darkness-enshrouded mother,
Calling to identity the unnamed,
Calling the unshaped into shape.
Primordial silence became speech and primal sound
Turned into singing, the spheres themselves singing thy word.
But in the dream, oh Fate, thou takest it back again,
Thou hushest it back into blankness,
Terrible, all-concealing, into thy denuded being,
And as a crystal flake the god himself sinks
Ray-melted into the empty dome of the dream."
Unmoved and gleaming the dream-dome absorbed the silent words, reflecting them silently and carrying them off into the echo-lack of the last light, and it seemed as if they themselves had been that radiant echo. Then he spoke on:
"Dream-saturating, dream-chilled Fate, thou
Revealest thyself in dream, bringing the dream
To the grandeur of a time in which reality inheres, making the dream
The receptacle of the Creation, working through thee
And through thee timeless; for thou knowest neither before nor after,
Reality that thou art—
Lavishly flows thine essence, oh arch-form, flows
Outspreading and fertile with life-stuff between the storm clouds
Mute-mighty in union, between the light and the night
Of Creation,, created at thy behest; but thou
Transformest thyself from one into the other
With the looping current of thy flowing,
Wishing to flow lightward—ah, canst thou?—yet where
Thy currents converge, as at a goal, stream on stream dependent,
There in serenity thou revealest the name and object of worldly truth,
United one into the other, evoked into wholeness to mirror thee,
Fate-stamped, the archetype of being, the archetype of truth.
Dream-form emerges from dream-form, overlaid and unfolded,
In dream thou art I, thou art my perception,
Born with me as an unborn angel,
Beyond mischance, the shining omni-form
Of essence and order in which knowledge itself is born,
Shape of myself, my knowledge.
God-delivered, god-destroying Fate,
Eternal Reality, I am eternal with thee,
A mortal, god-destroying in dream where I,
Enacting myself in thee, dissolving in thy brightness,
Enclosed in childhood, am myself the habitation of the god."
Was this the last habitation? was this the final resting-place? was not even this in movement? did he not have to move it forward? he tried to take a step, he tried to lift his arms, he tried to impart himself to this gleaming space which he already was, he tried this with great will-power, with utmost effort, and although the glassy transparency of his no longer apparent being did not allow for any sort of movement, he succeeded: a trembling, dreamy and remote, ran through him; oh, it was scarcely the intimation of a trembling, oh, it was scarcely an awareness of such an intimation, however it was at the same time—how could it have been otherwise—like a sympathetic vibration of the dream-dome, flooding back and forth as though the quiver were passing through the motionless, glinting paths of streaming light, through their intersections, raying out in every or no direction, passing through their effulgence of which it can and cannot be spoken, like a first and final shudder, scarcely noticeable yet somehow felt, the breath of a receding shadow, unstirred by a breath but withal a recollection of earthly life. Thereupon he spoke again:
"Unescapable! Have I mounted to thee or
Have I stumbled into thy depths? Abyss of form,
Abyss of above and below, abyss of the dream!
In the dream no one is able to laugh, likewise
No one is able to die—, behold,
How over-near to laughter is death, and behold
How far from both is Fate, to whom, since he is merely form,
Death has taught nothing of laughter—
This Fate, thy self-betrayal.
But I, a mortal, I, familiar with death,
Compelled by death to laughter,
I revolt from thee, I trust in thee no longer.
Dream-blind and dream-enlightened, I comprehend thy death,
I know the limit set for thee,
The boundary of dream that thou deniest.
Art thou also aware of it? Dost thou will it so?
Does thy being halt at thy command? Or does something greater halt thee?
Does still another Fate stand behind thee, stronger than thou art,
More inevitable, less discernible, and beyond and beyond,
Fate upon Fate, blank form on blank form, row on row,
Waits there the unattainable Nothing, the birth-death,
The very twin of Chance?
All law is subject to chance, to the fall into the abyss,
And thou too, oh, Fate, for in thy realm, including thee in its havoc,
There rages the chance of finality.
Suddenly growth ceases and the branches of wisdom,
Bough from bough sprouted, die off and drift
Into nullified speech,
Isolated into the object, isolated into the word,
Order in ruins, truth in ruins, brotherhood and concord
Benumbed in incompletion, torpid in the underbrush
Of specious existence.
Thou bringest forth the incomplete, thou sufferest the mishap,
Thou must tolerate evil, imperfection, deception, and
Thyself unrealized, no longer eternal in thy frozen form,
Fate of Fate, thou diest of evil, while yet in the crystal with me."
It was not he speaking, it was the dream that spoke; it was not he thinking, it was the dream that thought; it was not he dreaming, it was the dome of destiny radiating into the dream which dreamed; it was the dreaming of the unattainable, the interminable domed fixation of light, transfixed by evil, transfixing through evil, and there, motionlessly flooded in the cascades of light, was the temple of his unattainable soul. The light was unstirred, unstirred the healing cycle of adversity, unstirred even the breath. And lacking breath the dream spoke on:
"Form, even though arch-form, perishable for the mortal,
Perishable for the god, perishable in thy unreality,
Perishable in thy seething and specious wholeness,
Beyond redemption! though the part may pretend to be all,
Though it wish to hark back to the womb of the erstwhile maternal arch-night,
Though, usurping completeness, it even assume the summoning,
The office of the summoning Father,
Still nothing saves thee, Fate, from the reversion to nothingness;
Ravished with thine own fate, thou fallest back in empty reversion,
While worlds are wheeling,—interminable, inevitable their course
In the vacant orbit of beauty—drunken of thee
And drunken of death.
For creation is more than form, creation is resolution,
Is parting the bad from the good, oh only
This election is truly immortal.
Thou who art only form, hast thou called gods and men to truth
Only that they should take over thy determining mission, that they
Shoul
d establish the form of the world for all time?
Hast thou charged me therewith and ordained me in the creation?
Inadequate art thou, the tool of evil, thou didst make it,
Thyself art the evil, and thou canst not stem it,
The divine is exhausted, and the human, indeed
Remains unfortified—, these thy works, enchanced with thee in the greater Destiny,
And the Evoked, only form like thyself and deprived of a name,
Is beyond reach, he never swerves,
He hears no call in the fading dream."
Yes, he was beyond call: muteness surrounded his own muteness, nothing spoke to him any more and he was able to speak of nothing; nothing called to him and he was unable to call to anything. But the impression of dream-voices was spread about him, glistening and impenetrable, immobile and illimitable, glossy with the god-quelling evil, unescapable, all-encompassing, annulling the creation, the good and the evil blended together, the paths of light endless, their intersections without number, the light supernatural; yet for all that numbered, limited, earthly and destined to die away—, was the dream fading? and with the fading dream was the dreamer also fading away? Nothing was to be remembered, yet all was memory in the unhallowed desecration, in the shadowless, lovely light of the indiscriminate, in the light of the interminable enclosure, sunk memory-deep in fate's iridescent, stagnant game of limitations, the limits of which can and must be exceeded whenever the game has played itself out, plumbed to the uttermost depths of its diversifications, with its differentiations and cross-versions enumerated, the admixture of good and evil drained to the dregs, oh, evil itself drained to the dregs, fate's very form exhausted, died off in the dying memory, which no longer remembered to remember. Oh, memory, oh, extinction of light and the spheric singing of the world, oh the endless chain, the orbit of fateful consequences of extinguishment and re-lighting on earth, experiment after experiment of the creation, ever repeated, ever forced to be repeated until the evil is cast out of the light, until the ghostly-uncreated is removed from the self-creative in order that—the re-arched heaven being a certainty—the confirmation will again be manifested, will again shine out, the human countenance lifted up unto the borders of the spheres, unto the unseen linear play of the stars, lifted up to the stone-cool, starry face of the sky. And as if the constellations of the inner and outer worlds, vanishing to shining muteness from the excess of splendor, had preserved just a shred of breath, as if though beyond call they possessed just a remnant of darkest power wherewith to shine, as if the heart's lyre and that of heaven could resound once more, as if existence were not yet completely transformed into crystal, as if his own equilibrium were not completely restored, the scales of the universe not having come to a complete standstill, so that he still had some awareness, so that he was still permitted some awareness, the crystal's awareness of itself, the dream's awareness of itself, the awareness of the future and of consummation, the awareness of the ever-existent and the never-attained, revealing itself in a silvery tone from the most hidden self-recollection of the universe in which the crystal speech of dream is latent, the fore-echo of a future sound, this now spoke out in a last muteness:
The Death of Virgil Page 21
