Part 18 (1/2)
Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.
The Witness
In a stable that stands almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amid the odor of the animals, humbly tries to will himself into death, much as a man might will himself to sleep. The day, obedient to vast and secret laws, slowly s.h.i.+fts about and mingles the shadows in the lowly place; outside lie plowed fields, a ditch clogged with dead leaves, and the faint track of a wolf in the black clay where theUneof woods begins. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten.
The bells for orisons awaken him. Bells are now one of evening's customs in the king- doms of England, but as a boy the man has seen the face of Woden, the sa- cred horror and the exultation, the clumsy wooden idol laden with Roman coins and ponderous vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will be dead, and with him, the last eyewitness images of pagan rites will perish, never to be seen again. The world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.
Things, events, that occupy s.p.a.ce yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder -and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano andCharcas,a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a ma- hogany desk?
Martin Fierro
Out of this city marched armies that seemed grand, and that in later dayswere grand, thanks to the magnifying effects of glory. After many years, one of the soldiers returned, and in a foreign accent told stories of what had happened to him in places calledItuzaingoor Ayacucho.* These things are now as though they had never been.
There have been two tyrannies in this land. During the first, a wagon pulled out of La Plata market; as the wagon pa.s.sed through the streets, some men on the driver's seat cried out their wares, hawking white and yellow peaches; a young boy lifted the corner of the canvas that covered them and saw the heads of Unitarians, their beards b.l.o.o.d.y.* The second meant, for many, prison and death; for all, it meant discomfort, endless humiliation, a taste of shamefulness in the actions of every day. These things are now as though they had never been.
A man who knew all the words looked with painstaking love at the plants and birds of this land and defined them, perhaps forever, and in metaphors of metal wrote the vast chronicle of its tumultuous sunsets and the shapes of its moon.* These things are now as though they had never been.
Also in this land have generations known those common yet some- how eternal vicissitudes that are the stuff of art. These things are now as though they had never been, but in a hotel room in eighteen-hundred sixty-something a man dreamed of a knife fight.A gaucholifts a black man oft” the ground with the thrust of his knife, drops him like a bag of bones, watches him writhe in pain and die, squats down to wipe off his knife, un- ties his horse's bridle and swings up into the saddle slowly, so no one will think he's running away from what he's done. This thing that was once, returns again, infinitely; the visible armies have goneand what is left is a com- mon sort of knife fight; one man's dream is part of all men's memory.
Mutations
In a hallway I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and I was struck by the thought that that inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of Thermopylae and bequeathed toHarald Sigurdson,for all time, six feet of English earth.
Several days later, someone showed me a photograph of a Magyar horse- man; a coil of rope hung about his mount's chest. I learned that the rope, which had once flown through the air and la.s.soed bulls in the pasture, was now just an insolent decoration on a rider's Sunday riding gear.
In the cemetery on the Westside I saw a runic cross carved out of red marble; its arms splayed and widened toward the ends and it was bounded by a circle. That circ.u.mscribed and limited cross was a figure of the cross with unbound arms that is in turn the symbol of the gallows on which a G.o.d was tortured-that ”vile machine” decried byLucianof Samosata.
Cross, rope, and arrow: ancient implements of mankind, today re- duced, or elevated, to symbols. I do not know why I marvel at them so, when there is nothing on earth that forgetfulness does not fade, memory al- ter, and when no one knows what sort of image the future may translate it into.
Parable of Cervantes and theQuixote
Weary of his land of Spain, an old soldier of the king's army sought solace in the vast geographies of Ariosto, in that valley of the moon in which one finds the time that is squandered by dreams, and in the golden idol of Muhammad stolen byMontalban.
In gentle self-mockery, this old soldier conceived a credulous man-his mind unsettled by the reading of all those wonders-who took it into his head to ride out in search of adventures and enchantments in prosaic places with names such asEl TobosoandMontici.
Defeated by reality, by Spain, don Quixote died in 1614 in the town of his birth. He was survived only a short time by MigueldeCervantes.
For both the dreamer and the dreamed, that entire adventure had been the clash of two worlds; the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.
They never suspected that the years would at last smooth away the dis- cord, never suspected that in the eyes of the future,La ManchaandMonticiand the lean figure of the Knight of Mournful Countenance would be no less poetic than the adventures of Sindbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.
For in the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.
DevotoClinic January 1955
Paradiso,x.x.xI,108
Diodorus Sicul.u.s.tells thestoryof a G.o.d that is cut into pieces and scattered over the earth. Which of us, walking through the twilight or retracing some day in our past, has never felt that we have lost some infinite thing?
Mankind has lost a face, an irrecoverable face, and all men wish they could be that pilgrim (dreamed in the empyrean, under the Rose) who goes to Rome and looks upon the veil of St. Veronica and murmurs in be- lief:My Lord Jesus Christ, very G.o.d, is this, indeed, Thy likeness in such fash- ion wrought?*There is a face in stone beside a path, and an inscription that readsThe True Portrait of the Holy Face of the Christ ofJaen.If we really knew what that face looked like, we would possess the key to the parables, and know whether the son of the carpenter was also the Son of G.o.d.
Paul saw the face as a light that struck him to the ground; John, as the sun when it s.h.i.+nes forth in all its strength; Teresade Jesus,many times, bathed in serene light, although she could never say with certainty what the color of its eyes was.
Those features are lost to us, as a magical number created from our cus- tomary digits can be lost, as the image in a kaleidoscope is lost forever. We can see them and yet notgrasp them. A Jew's profile in the subway might be the profile of Christ; the hands that give us back change at a ticket booth may mirror those that soldiers nailed one day to the cross.
Some feature of the crucified face may lurk in every mirror; perhaps the face died, faded away, so that G.o.d might be all faces.
Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinths of dream, and not know tomorrow that we saw it.
Parable of the Palace
That day the Yellow Emperor showed his palace to the poet. Little by little, step by step, they left behind, in long procession, the first westward-facing terraces which, like the jaggedhemicyclesof an almost unbounded am- phitheater, stepped down into a paradise, a garden whose metal mirrors and intertwined hedges of juniper werea prefigurationof the labyrinth. Cheer- fully they lost themselves in it-at first as though condescending to a game, but then not without some uneasiness, because its straightallees suffered from a very gentle but continuous curvature, so that secretly the avenues were circles. Around midnight, observation of the planets and the oppor- tune sacrifice of a tortoise allowed them to escape the bonds of that region that seemed enchanted, though not to free themselves from that sense of being lost that accompanied them to the end. They wandered next through antechambers and courtyards and libraries, and then through a hexagonal room with a water clock, and one morning, from a tower, they made out a man of stone, whom later they lost sight of forever. In canoes hewn from sandalwood, they crossed many gleaming rivers-or perhaps a single river many times. The imperial entourage would pa.s.s and people would fall to their knees and bow their heads to the ground, but one day the courtiers came to an island where one man did not do this, for he had never seen the Celestial Son before, and the executioner had to decapitate him. The eyes of the emperor and poet looked with indifference on black tresses and black dances and golden masks; the real merged and mingled with the dreamed-or the real, rather, was one of the shapes the dream took. It seemed impossible that the earth should be anything but gardens, foun- tains, architectures, and forms of splendor. Every hundred steps a tower cut the air, to the eye, their color was identical, but the first of them was yellow and the last was scarlet; that was how delicate the gradations were and how long the series.
It was at the foot of the penultimate tower that the poet (who had ap- peared untouched by the spectacles which all the others had so greatly mar- veled at) recited the brief composition that we link indissolubly to his name today, the words which, as the most elegant historians never cease repeat- ing, garnered the poet immortality and death. The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it consisted of but a single line; others, of a single word.