Meditation On Saviors

I

When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element

       and smelt it like water,

Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a

       little troublesome, a little terrible.

I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death

       nor in a walled garden,

In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that

       easily lock the world out of doors.

Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet

       granite sea-fang it is easy to praise

Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the

       herds of the people that one should love them?

If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's

       delight in the herds of the future. Not yours.

Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy.

       Leave the joys of government to Caesar.

Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the

       world falls on decay in the flesh increasing

Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient

       blindness, and clemency for love.

This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world

       waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little,

Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the

       savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath.

The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but

       wisdom without love is the present savior,

Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing

       the world with deep indifference.

The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known;

       words and the little envies will hardly

Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they

       have never dared to confront.

II

Point Lobos lies over the hollowed water like a humped whale

       swimming to shoal; Point Lobos

Was wounded with that fire; the hills at Point Sur endured it;

       the palace at Thebes; the hill Calvary.

Out of incestuous love power and then ruin. A man forcing the

       imaginations of men,

Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his

       own household with impious desire.

King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears

       pouring from the torn pits

Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill

       in the earthquake, against the eclipse

Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the

       people: -that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist? -

I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to

       its expiation; I heard the same cry.

A bad mountain to build your world on. Am I another keeper of

       the people, that on my own shore,

On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the

       sicknesses I left behind me concern me?

Here where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid

       west, over the deeps

Light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns

       flower and burn through color to quietness;

Then the ecstasy of the stars is present? As for the people, I

       have found my rock, let them find theirs.

Let them lie down at Caesar's feet and be saved; and he in his

       time reap their daggers of gratitude.

III

Yet I am the one made pledges against the refuge contempt, that

       easily locks the world out of doors.

This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from

       whom I desire not to be fugitive.

I see them: they are always crying. The shored Pacific makes

       perpetual music, and the stone mountains

Their music of silence, the stars blow long pipings of light:

       the people are always crying in their hearts.

One need not pity; certainly one must not love. But who has seen

       peace, if he should tell them where peace

Lives in the world…they would be powerless to understand; and

       he is not willing to be reinvolved.

IV

How should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell

       the people anything but relative to that?

But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once,

       of man and woman, of civilized

And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of

       living and dead, of human and not

Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him

       to speak? And what could his words change?

The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But

       the man's words would be fixed also,

Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same

       present compulsion in the iron consistency.

And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred

       centuries quieted, some desert

Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud-

       walled village and the mountain sepulchres.

V

Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the

       open farms, and the people are fed.

They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in

       the desert made them their thoughts.

VI

Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed

       bloodthirstiness. Among the mild and unwarlike

Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard, Confucius needed

       but live greatly and be heard:

This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on

       the high cross to catch at their memories;

The price is known. I have quieted love; for love of the people

       I would not do it. For power I would do it.

—But that stands against reason: what is power to a dead man,

       dead under torture? —What is power to a man

Living, after the flesh is content? Reason is never a root,

       neither of act nor desire.

For power living I would never do it; they're not delightful to

       touch, one wants to be separate. For power

After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the

       abstract unborn children toward peace…

A man might have paid anguish indeed. Except he had found the

       standing sea-rock that even this last

Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace

       that quiets the desire even of praising it.

VII

Yet look: are they not pitiable? No: if they lived forever they

       would be pitiable:

But a huge gift reserved quite overwhelms them at the end; they

       are able then to be still and not cry.

And having touched a little of the beauty and seen a little of

       the beauty of things, magically grow

Across the funeral fire or the hidden stench of burial

       themselves into the beauty they admired,

Themselves into the God, themselves into the sacred steep

       unconsciousness they used to mimic

Asleep between lamp's death and dawn, while the last drunkard

       stumbled homeward down the dark street.

They are not to be pitied but very fortunate; they need no

       savior, salvation comes and takes them by force,

It gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the

       blown storms, the stream's-end ocean.

With this advantage over their granite grave-marks, of having

       realized the petulant human consciousness

Before, and then the greatness, the peace: drunk from both

       pitchers: these to be pitied? These not fortunate

But while he lives let each man make his health in his mind, to

       love the coast opposite humanity

And so be freed of love, laying it like bread on the waters; it

       is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest.

Love, the mad wine of good and evil, the saint's and murderer's,

       the mote in the eye that makes its object

Shine the sun black; the trap in which it is better to catch the

       inhuman God than the hunter's own image.

Anonymous submission.