And the gesture of flight is present throughout his music. Throughout it, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutter of glistening ephemeridæ that wheel and skim delightfully through the limpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparing themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poèmes ailés," flights toward some island of the blest. They are all aspirations "vers la flamme," toward the spiritual fire of joy, toward the paradise of divine pleasure and divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like the marshaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant flyer launching himself into the empyrean. White gleaming pinions wheel and hover in the godlike close of the "Poème divine." Impotent caged wings poise themselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata, beat for an instant, are ominously still. Sometimes, as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is like a gorgeous tropical bird preening himself in the quivering river light. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspreading his mighty pinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing preludes, there is still the breath of flight. But this time it is another motion. Is it "the wind of death's imperishable wing"? Is it the blind hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthly habitation in the moment of dissolution? One cannot tell.
And it was the flight of ecstasy that he sought to achieve in his symphonic poems. He had made for himself a curious personal religion, a bizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in part conceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation and deification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged as active and passive celebrants. Together they were to ascend from plane to plane of delight, experiencing divine struggle and divine bliss and divine creativity. The music was to call the soul through the gate of the sense of hearing, to lead it, slowly, hieratically, up through circle after circle of heaven, until the mystical gongs boomed and the mass emotion reached the Father of Souls, and was become God. With Jules Romains, Scriabine would have cried to his audiences:
"Tu vas mourir tantot, sous le poids de tes heures:
Les hommes, delies, glisseront par les portes,
Les ongles de la nuit t'arracheront la chair.
Qu'importe!
Tu es mienne avant que tu sois morte;
Les corps qui sont ici, la ville peut les prendre;
Ils garderont au front comme une croix de cendre
Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant!"