From the east, a cloud, swollen and purple, voyages upon the sun. The earth shudders as the sun is shut out, and like a festooned ship upon a mournful sea it founders. Moving toward home, I move in a dark element, and it has swallowed all the laughing world. This lawn is a breast of decomposing flesh. The stones of the city are death substantiate, feeding upon the drab-clothed men and women who weave within and without in wistful struggle to escape. Upon my window-sill where Spring sat and pelted me with flowers, an empty breath breathes emptiness.... The true stuff of space in which our cosmos flickers like a fly in a night of storm?
I am on my couch.
—Oh, there must be a truth to salvage me from chaos. Life is a whirlwind? Let the Lord which is Truth speak to me then from His whirlwind.
c
THREE weeks I lie on my couch and am alone. Three weeks of travail and unceasing night. And at the three weeks’ end, an infant birth of truth so frail and so nostalgic of its womb that it scarce wills to breathe, and every hour I must nurse it forward lest it lapse back into the sweet Abyss.
The travail has its own life. When it is done, there is the babe of a truth. And yet how are they joined, this deep volumnear anguish and this green sprout rising after? My travail is an earth: and from its dark and secret brood springs a light shoot of knowing....
I am in labor of my vision. I lie locked in a distress spherical, moveless. My room moves through time, time filters into it, so I can mark the days. But time does not live in this passionate whirling Sphere that is the immobile body of my meditation. Or if time, not thrice seven days but all the years of my life and all the ages of my roots ere I lived. All the pain of my years and their joys were this great coil about me: were the bedded soil of my distress. And all my loves and dreams lived in it like the solved minerals in earth. But this spheric stuff about me is not my love nor my hate, not memory nor dream, not pain nor joy: is all of these and mysteriously more....
I am a child in my mother’s arms, and I am grown and from my lips harsh words berate this passionate woman who is my mother and who has withdrawn from life, finding it in her pride too painful to be borne. I am a boy striding with awkward steps beside the magnificence of my father, and at school facing alone a crisis where he has failed to follow ... too selfish, too dry to share in my emotion. Thoughts in serried troops invest my mind, and I live and sleep in a clamor of science, philosophy and dream. Fragments of verse tinkle in the stream of studious hours: bones of dissected bodies and sprays of Spring float together down my youthful way. I am a lover, bringing to the bed of my beloved nosegays of books and notes. Words rise like birds from the margin of my mind, and blacken the sky and scream and sink again, suddenly become the stones of an exploded city crashing to the ground. Here is a bower redolent of dusk: my hands clasp the waist of a girl and touch her breast. And in the limpid shadow of the trees, there is a grave and I must enter it, and study bones: and count the countless cells that a girl’s breast has moved to ecstasy within me. I sit with a story book in the old house and watch my father rustle the evening paper while my mother plays languorous music at the piano. My own hand rises menacing from my little body: grows: grows immense: crushes father and mother: shatters the walls of our house. I walk upon a field that glitters underneath a scarlet sky. Sudden my beloved parents and the field and all the things of earth, and all the things that live, lift into sound!