MANY DAYS LATER.
At last I am in the height of the mighty pass, and indite this hastily before descending to the plain, or valley, or ocean, which is hid below the bright mist. My seat is the fallen pillar of a Roman terminus or boundary stone, engrooved (if I misread it not) with the name and dignities of the Caesar Caligula; but it may be the prone stalk of a uniquely smooth tree whose bark hath been disfigured by accidentally runic crevices, for the mist is so dazzling-white that I can distinguish a very few inches past the coupled convergent apertures of my eliptical nose-thirls. The guide says we will arrive in an hour. She conveys her meaning by smiles and stroaks of the hand which I comprehend perfectly (there are waterfalls all round whose liquid cluckings, gurglings and yellings drown all words) and it occurs to me that the first pure language my ancestors shared before Babylon was not of voice but of exactly these smiles and stroaks of the hand. I believe I am come to the edge of the greatest and happiest discovery of my life.
PROMETHEUS
IT WAS UNKIND OF THE JEWS TO GIVE the job of building the world to one man for it made him very lonely. Earlier people saw the creator as a woman giving birth, which is sore, but not sore on the head, and fulfils body and soul until the empty feeling starts. But these wandering shepherds were so used to featureless plains under a vast sky (not even the sea is vaster than the sky) that they thrust a naked man into formless void and left him there forever with nothing to remember, not even the sweetness of a mother’s breast.
Roman Catholics and the English parliamentary poet Milton evade the horror of this by placing the void below a mansion where God lives in luxury among angelic flunkeys. Satan, his sinister head waiter, provokes a palace rebellion resulting in a serious staff-shortage; so God, without leaving his throne, gives orders which create a breeding and testing ground (the earth) for a new race of servants (mankind). This notion is very reassuring to people with power and to those weaklings and parasites who admire them. Most citizens with a religion really do believe that heaven is a large private property, and that without a boss to command them they would be nobody. I reject this bourgeois image of God. If God is the first cause of things then he started in a vacuum with no support and no ideas except those arising from his passions. Some commentators present the void as a sort of watery egg on which God broods like a hen until it hatches. Oh yes, why not? This sweet notion is easily reconciled with the splitting of that grand primordial atom which scientists have made so popular. But I am better than a scientist. The Jewish Genesis intoxicates me by attributing all creation to a mind like mine, so to understand God I need only imagine myself in his situation.
First, then, black void, pure and unflawed by sensations. No heat, no cold, no pressure, no extent. What is there to do? Be. Being is all that can be done. But gradually a sensation does occur, the sensation of duration. We perceive that we have been for a long time, that we will be forever in this darkness unless we do something. The more we endure of our dark self the less we can bear it. We move from boredom to unease and then to panic-horror of an eternity like this. We are in Hell. So the cry “Let there be light” is not an order but a desperate prayer to our own unknown powers. It is also a scream rejecting everything we know by committing us to an unimaginable opposite. And there is light. And oh, what appalling vertigo we feel when eternity becomes infinity also and we find ourselves floating beside above beneath that dazzling blank bright breadth, height, depth with no content but ourselves. The light is too much for us, we turn to darkness again. And the evening and the morning are the first day.
Genesis says God saw the light, that it was good, but I cannot imagine him standing happily upon that boundless floor of light before he has peopled it with creatures. His first creature is water, a body compatible with his agitation and as formless as his thinking at this stage. Its sparkling movement reflects and refracts the light into every possible tone and tint, there is a rainbow in each drop of it. With this water he makes the sliding architecture of the sea and the steady, starry flood of the firmament. Unscientific? Good. I would have it so. I will skip most of the other stages. By the sixth day God is almost wholly incarnate. We taste earth and dew through a million roots, our leaves and blossoms sense and scent the air, we graze on our herbs and strike beaks into our squealing flesh while our unutterable doubt of the whole enterprise sneaks searchingly through sunlit grass in the body of the serpent. Our largest intellectual powers are almost (but not quite) realized in Adam, who kneels to study, in a puzzled way, his reflection in a quiet stream. The reflection causes a stiffening in his ureter which has to do with the attached seedballs, but the stiffening is not sufficient to impregnate the image in the water or the moist gravel under it. What other body do we need? Eve, of course, our last and most intricate creature. So Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain. And Cain knew his wife, who conceived and bare Enoch, who builded a city. And after more generations of knowing and conceiving, a Seventh-Day Adventist, Joseph Pollard, cleaved to his far more liberal wife Marie, who conceived and bare myself, the poet. If your education is adequate you already know I have been paraphrasing the start of my Sacred Sociology, printed privately at Dijon in 1934.
My infancy resembled that of God, my ancestor. I only dimly recall the dark time before I screamed into light, but I was in that dark, like all of us, and I screamed, and there was light. I may have found the light emptier than most. My mother once told me, in an amused voice, that as a baby I screamed continually until one day they sent for a doctor. He examined me minutely then said, “Madam, what you have here is a screaming baby.” Clearly she had never wondered what I was screaming for. Herself, probably. But soon my vocal chaos acquired the rhythm and colours of articulate speech and I named and commanded a child’s small universe. My command was not absolute. In my tenth year Marie Pollard eloped to Algiers with one of her husband’s business acquaintances. I sympathized with at least half the feelings which compelled her. Illness had made Joseph Pollard hard to live with. His fits of blinding rage destroyed a great deal of furniture and did not always spare the human body. But I am grateful to him. Paul Cezanne once said, “My father was the real genius. He left me a million francs.” Father Pollard was not such a genius as Father Cezanne, but in my eighteenth year he freed me from himself and the curse of earning my bread by succumbing to cancer of the spleen. The consequent income did not permit me to marry, or support a housekeeper, or to frequent respectable brothels; but I silenced the desperate hunger in my young heart by studying it, and the world containing it, and by learning to read all the great scared books in their original tongues. And I depressed my professors at the Sorbonne by finally submitting no thesis. A poet need not truck with bureaucrats.