W.H. Auden
After shaking paws with his dog,
(Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind,)
The hangman sets off briskly over the heath;
He does not know yet who will be provided
To do the high works of Justice with:
Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom,
(Today she has one of her headaches)
With a sigh the judge descends his marble stair;
He does not know by what sentence
He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars:
And the poet, taking a breather
Round his garden before starting his eclogue,
Does not know whose Truth he will tell.
Sprites of hearth and store-room, godlings
Of professional mysteries, the Big Ones
Who can annihilate a city,
Cannot be bothered with this moment: we are left,
Each to his secret cult, now each of us
Prays to an image of his image of himself:
‘Let me get through this coming day
Without a dressing down from a superior,
Being worsted in a repartee,
Or behaving like an ass in front of the girls;
Let something exciting happen,
Let me find a lucky coin on a sidewalk.
Let me hear a new funny story.’
At this hour we all might be anyone:
It is only our victim who is without a wish
Who knows already (that is what
We can never forgive. If he knows the answers,
Then why are we here, why is there even dust?)
Knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,
That not one of us will slip up,
That the machinery of our world will function
Without a hitch, that today, for once,
There will be no squabbling on Mount Olympus,
No Chthonian mutters of unrest,
But no other miracle, knows that by sundown
We shall have had a good Friday.
Beginning. Middle. End.
Che non possa tornar l’ eterno amore,
Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.
- Purgatorio, III
W.H. Auden
Simultaneously, as soundlessly,
Spontaneously, suddenly
As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind
Gates of the body fly open
To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,
The horn gate and the ivory gate
Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously
Quell the nocturnal rummage
Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,
Ill-natured and second-rate,
Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned
By an historical mistake:
Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,
From absence to be on display,
Without a name or history I wake
Between my body and the day.
Holy this moment, wholly in the right,
As, in complete obedience
To the light’s laconic outcry, next
As a sheet, near as a wall,
Out there as a mountain’s poise of stone,
The world is present, about,
And I know that I am, here, not alone
But with a world and rejoice
Unvexed, for the will has still to claim
This adjacent arm as my own,
The memory to name me, resume
Its routine of praise and blame
And smiling to me is this instant while
Still the day is intact, and I
The Adam sinless in our beginning,
Adam still previous to any act.
I draw breath; this is of course to wish
No matter what, to be wise,
To be different, to die and the cost,
No matter how, is Paradise
Lost of course and myself owing a death:
The eager ridge, the steady sea,
The flat roofs of the fishing village
Still asleep in its bunny,
Though as fresh and sunny still are not friends
But things to hand, this ready flesh
No honest equal, but my accomplice now
My assassin to be, and my name
Stands for my historical share of care
For a lying self-made city,
Afraid of our living task, the dying
Which the coming day will ask.
He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
– Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992.
***
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurels they go; but I am not resigned.Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, - but the rest is lost.The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love -
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. I am not resigned.- Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Dirge without Music”. HarperCollins, 1958.
McCarthy’s “vision of a single flower” is a comic moment in the great tragedian’s world, as if the frailest example of beauty on a battlefield might account for the blood shed by nations. The sentence, a flower in itself, is the character’s yearning to justify the violence wrought by nature and man.
Millay on the other hand, doesn’t buy that there is enough beauty in the world to justify the loss of the beauty inherent in a person, especially those tender, kind, intelligent, witty, and brave souls who go quietly and gently into that good night.
Both McCarthy and Millay long for justice. And both figure beauty into the balance.
What type of beauty, were it found or cultivated, would make a person whole after a loss of this magnitude? Millay doesn’t think there is such a beauty, but she almost refuses to acknowledge the deficit, too. McCarthy’s corpus would probably suggest, “What does it matter? The impersonal world will go on long after we’re no longer able to behold and mark beauty. Enjoy beauty before you become indiscriminate dust.”
***
“I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set eternity in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”
- Ecclesiastes 3:10-11. King James Version, 1611.
The writer of Ecclesiastes sees something else: that beauty in itself is a kind of tragedy because of its time limit. In our beholding of beauty we already recognize its end, which creates a longing for eternity where beauty will not pass away. Maybe even a beauty where all our loss is restored to us, even if that loss, as McCarthy would say, came at our own hand.
How exacting is it then that God, in the form of a man who marked beauty – tender, kind, intelligent, witty, and brave Christ who went quietly and gently – died violently by the hands of men in the ultimate act of injustice, and He did so with the intent that our loss would be restored? How exacting and beautiful?
What work is God about from beginning to end?
Chauvet Cave Paintings in France. Circa 31,000 years ago.
The Bible won’t be reduced to mere representations and symbols, although it has those. The Bible is much like the angel that Jacob wrestles, refusing to be pinned. Refusing to be named or seen completely. Able with a touch to ruin the reader and able to bless him forever. Even to rename the reader.
And the name it gives the reader? One who struggles with God.
Jack Baumgartner, an artist from Kansas, engraved this linocut print called Jacob Wrestling with the Angel of God. (A special thanks to Jack for allowing me to use an image of his print.)
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