Apology For Bad Dreams

I

In the purple light, heavy with redwood, the slopes drop seaward,

Headlong convexities of forest, drawn in together to the steep

ravine. Below, on the sea-cliff,

A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof

under spared trees. Then the ocean

Like a great stone someone has cut to a sharp edge and polished

to shining. Beyond it, the fountain

And furnace of incredible light flowing up from the sunk sun.

In the little clearing a woman

Is punishing a horse; she had tied the halter to a sapling at the

edge of the wood, but when the great whip

Clung to the flanks the creature kicked so hard she feared he

would snap the halter; she called from the house

The young man her son; who fetched a chain tie-rope, they

working together

Noosed the small rusty links round the horse's tongue

And tied him by the swollen tongue to the tree.

Seen from this height they are shrunk to insect size.

Out of all human relation. You cannot distinguish

The blood dripping from where the chain is fastened,

The beast shuddering; but the thrust neck and the legs

Far apart. You can see the whip fall on the flanks . . .

The gesture of the arm. You cannot see the face of the woman.

The enormous light beats up out of the west across the cloud-bars

of the trade-wind. The ocean

Darkens, the high clouds brighten, the hills darken together.

Unbridled and unbelievable beauty

Covers the evening world . . . not covers, grows apparent out

of it, as Venus down there grows out

From the lit sky. What said the prophet? "I create good: and

I create evil: I am the Lord."

II

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places,

(The quiet ones ask for quieter suffering: but here the granite cliff

the gaunt cypresses crown

Demands what victim? The dykes of red lava and black what

Titan? The hills like pointed flames

Beyond Soberanes, the terrible peaks of the bare hills under the

sun, what immolation? )

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and

like the passionate spirit of humanity

Pain for its bread: God's, many victims', the painful deaths, the

horrible transfigurements: I said in my heart,

"Better invent than suffer: imagine victims

Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you

Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place." And I said,

"Burn sacrifices once a year to magic

Horror away from the house, this little house here

You have built over the ocean with your own hands

Beside the standing boulders: for what are we,

The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips

And little hair, to think we should always be fed,

Sheltered, intact, and self-controlled? We sooner more liable

Than the other animals. Pain and terror, the insanities of desire;

not accidents but essential,

And crowd up from the core:" I imagined victims for those

wolves, I made them phantoms to follow,

They have hunted the phantoms and missed the house. It is not

good to forget over what gulfs the spirit

Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower blown

seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness.

III

Boulders blunted like an old bear's teeth break up from the

headland; below them

All the soil is thick with shells, the tide-rock feasts of a dead

people.

Here the granite flanks are scarred with ancient fire, the ghosts

of the tribe

Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to remember

the sunlight,

Light has died out of their skies. These have paid something for

the future

Luck of the country, while we living keep old griefs in memory:

though God's

Envy is not a likely fountain of ruin, to forget evils calls down

Sudden reminders from the cloud: remembered deaths be our

redeemers;

Imagined victims our salvation: white as the half moon at midnight

Someone flamelike passed me, saying, "I am Tamar Cauldwell,

I have my desire,"

Then the voice of the sea returned, when she had gone by, the

stars to their towers.

. . . Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to the

Sur Rivers

Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the

Carmel water.

IV

He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor

From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents

victims, is only the ape of that God.

He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with

fire in the red crucible,

Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and

stands naked, he sees the spirit,

He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom

is broken, the power that massed it

Cries to the power that moves the stars, "I have come home to

myself, behold me.

I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me

In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth,

Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments,

And here am I moving the stars that are me."

I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason

For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.

He being sufficient might be still. I think they admit no reason;

they are the ways of my love.

Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no

thought apparent but burns darkly

Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault: no

thought outside: a certain measure in phenomena:

The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland,

the ever-returning roses of dawn.