All the world
is tremulous with purpose; I am foolish, untaught. Tentative, like a man fording a river in winter; hesitant, as if fearful of neighbors; formal like a guest; falling apart like thawing ice, as vacant as a valley.…” I stared in amazement, though a moment’s reflection
would have shown me the truth:
even the goddess of purity and zeal had her earthen side, sodden and selfish, determined to endure, outwitting
the world
by magically becoming it. The two moon-goddesses,
Artemis and Hekate,
were secretly the same.
I turned, despairing
of the purity drowned in that warty, fiat-headed lump.
But the farm-wife
reached to me, checking my impulse to flee, and argued
with me further,
queerly indifferent herself, I thought, to the argument. Her few teeth were like a dog’s; her withered hands
were palsied.
“ ‘On disaster,’ the brave and ambitious say, ‘good
fortune perches.’
But I say, ‘It is beneath good fortune that disaster
crouches.’ ”
She leered again, and by a gesture incredibly simple
and subtle—
no more, perhaps, than the slightest perceptible
movement of her eyes—
she suggested a huge and obscene bump and grind.
She cooed, eyes closed,
“The further one goes
the less one knows
for hustle and bustle,
for hustle and bustle;
Therefore the wise man moves not a muscle.”
She chuckled, foolish and apologetic, and I determined
to waste no more time on her.
Reckless and honest as a madman, I burst
through the seething ocean of gods to Zeus’s feet,
where Apollo,
shining like the mirroring sea, sat tuning his lyre
for a song—
gentle Apollo with the dragon tusks of Helios.
“Stop!” I cried out — and all motion stopped, even
the movement
of Apollo’s sleeve in the gentle cosmic wind. I shouted, angrily slamming my right fist into my left-hand palm, “I object! This palace is a mockery! The whole creation is a monstrous, idiotic mockery! The silliest child on
his mother’s knee
knows good from evil, selfishness from love.” Nothing
stirred, no one moved.
I turned around, gazed at the gods stretching out in
all directions from the throne,
and my soul was filled with amazement and ecstasy at
my power to instruct and lecture them.
I stretched out my hands like a preacher addressing
multitudes, and I felt aglow
like a winter sun. “If the truth is so clear even dogs
can see it, how dare the gods
be baffled and befuddled, raising up time after time mad
idiots to positions of power,
filling the schools with professors with not one jot or
tittle of love for the things
they pretend to teach; filling the pulpits with atheists
and cowards who put on their robes
for love of their mothers, merely; and filling the courts
with lawyers indifferent to justice,
the medical schools with connivers and thieves and
snivelling, sneaking incompetents,
the seats of government with madmen and bullies — all
this though nothing in the world is clearer
than evil and good, the line between justice and
unselfishness (the way of the decent)
and cowardice, piggish greed, foul arrogance, the
filth-fat darkness of the devil’s forces!”
As I spoke, declaiming, making existence as clear
as day—
saying nothing not spoken by the noblest of poets and
sages since time
began (and I said far more than I’ve set down here,
believe me—
revealed to the gods all the wisdom of the Hindus,
the secret rediscovered
by Schopenhauer, how man must perceive that the
spirit in himself
is a spark of the fire that’s in all things living, so that
hurting another
means hurting himself; told them how Jesus was angry
at the tomb
of Lazarus, how the awesome Tibetan Book of the Dead has a lower truth and a higher truth; told them of
the poetry
of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Homer and Virgil, Chia Yi
and Tu Fu,
and the anonymous Kelts—The hall of Cynddylan is
dark tonight,
without fire, without candle. But for God, who’ll give
me sanity?—
all this and more) — as I spoke I felt more and more
filled with light,
more filled with the strange and divine understanding
of the mystery of Love
that Dante spoke of in his Paradiso, all the
scattered leaves
of the universe gathered—legato con amore—and as
I spoke, I seemed
to rise without effort, like an eagle with his wings
spread wide on an updraft
past Zeus’s shins to his bolt-square knees, past his belly
and chest
(still gesturing, lecturing, compressing all life to the
burning globe
of a family knit by unalterable love — my own
humble family,
for where but in a wife, after twenty-one years of
loyalty and faith,
sorrows and shocks that would shake down mountains,
and a joyous holiness
that theory and defense leave empty and foolish as
program notes
or the weight in ounces of a lily at twilight — where
else can a man
learn surely of things inexpressible?), and I rose
to the very
brow of Zeus, high above drifting haze, above life, and stopped mid-sentence. I gazed all around me
in alarm.
I was standing on a mountain, miles past the timber, a place cased
thickly in ice,
snowdust everywhere like fire in a furnace. My shoes
were frozen,
my fingers were blue. “Goddess!” I howled. The
old fat farm-wife,
whiskered like a goat and as dull of eye as a child
without wits,
came smiling toward me like a ship’s prow sliding
out of mist. She stood
and looked at me awhile with her drooling grin,
then turned her back
and squatted, inviting me to ride. I climbed on.
Immediately I seemed
much warmer. As we started down she sang a foolish
sort of song,
its music vaguely like an echo of Apollo’s tuning of
his harp:
“On Cold Mountain
The lone round moon
Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.
Honor this priceless natural treasure
Concealed in five shadows,
Sunk deep in the flesh.”
We came down to the clouds, then down to the
timberline;
came to a view of high villages — goatsheds, barns
on stilts.
We came to a river. The foul witch sang:
‘When men see old Lill
They all say she’s crazy
And not much to look at—