I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea,
Touched the Grail—and could not swallow,
Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down.
Prophet, maybe.
Pilgrim, perhaps.
But only in
the intellectual, critical, philosophical, evangelical
senses....
Happy?
The ego was often happy—his big ego.
At Peace?
He had tranquillity where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.
Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass.
Still he believed it.
The truth shall make ye free.
Still he cried out that men are born for freedom.
And he died, a prophet without particular honor in the
home town of himself.
He shouted:
Forever learn the new
Down with everything as is
Seek God beyond his Holy Names
Behold yourself
(Intellectual, critic, philosopher, preacher)
The while, he beheld but morsels of himself, and—like
other men—admired them as if they were the fabric of reality
and not the gingerly scissored swatches of one awareness.
Well, go away now, Wylie.
It is the time, as you so intellectually predicted, for an
improved you or a better somebody to take over the problem.
Good night, sweet hypocrite.
Dauntless disappointment.
Oaf.
Of course, I argued with myself against self-condemnation.
I am a contemporary man, I insisted.
Too conditioned by father and mother, school, church, America, the common law, and this and that, and you, and you, to expect in a single lifetime (not too long, either) that I could, by whatever authenticity of effort, penetrate thousands, thousands, thousands of years of the unpenetrated stuff in my superego and discover the true whole of me beyond: the conveniently overlooked, the misrepresented, the tabooed, the forgotten, the unfrocked, the submerged structure of humanity itself.