from The Triumph of Love

I Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp. XIII Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks: tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge: committed in absentia to solemn elevation, Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral music, for male and female voices ringingly a cappella, made for double string choirs, congregated brass, choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting, like glassblowers, inventions of supreme order? XIV As to bad faith, Malebranche might argue it rests with inattention. Stupidity is not admissible. However, the status of apprehension remains at issue. Some qualities are best left unrecognized. Needless to say, unrecognized is not unacknowledged. Unnamed is not nameless. XVII If the gospel is heard, all else follows: the scattering, the diaspora, the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye. Penitence can be spoken of, it is said, but is itself beyond words; even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors, keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years, doubly outcast: even so I would remember— the scattering, the diaspora. We do not know the saints. His mercy is greater even than his wisdom. If the gospel is heard, all else follows. We shall rise again, clutching our wounds. XXXV Even now, I tell myself, there is a language to which I might speak and which would rightly hear me; responding with eloquence; in its turn, negotiating sense without insult given or injury taken. Familiar to those who already know it elsewhere as justice, it is met also in the form of silence. XXIX Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather, he might be dead. Too bad. So how much more does he have of injury time? XL For wordly, read worldly; for in equity, inequity; for religious read religiose; for distinction detestation. Take accessible to mean acceptable, accommodating, openly servile. Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don’t care what I say, do I? XLI For iconic priesthood, read worldly pique and ambition. Change insightfully caring to pruriently intrusive. Delete chastened and humbled. Insert humiliated. Interpret slain in the spirit as browbeaten to exhaustion. For hardness of heart read costly dislike of cant. XLII Excuse me—excuse me—I did not say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in the lifting. No—please—forget it. XLIII This is quite dreadful—he’s become obsessed. There you go, there you go—narrow it down to obsession! LI Whatever may be meant by moral landscape, it is for me increasingly a terrain seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary, conglomerate, metamorphic rock- strata, in which particular grace, individual love, decency, endurance, are traceable across the faults. LII Admittedly at times this moral landscape to my exasperated ear emits archaic burrings like a small, high-fenced electricity sub-station of uncertain age in a field corner where the flies gather and old horses shake their sides. LXVI Christ has risen yet again to their ritual supplication. It seems weird that the comedy never self-destructs. Actually it is strengthened—if attenuation is strength. (Donne said as much of gold. Come back, Donne, I forgive you; and lovely Herbert.) But what strange guild is this that practises daily synchronized genuflection and takes pride in hazing my Jewish wife? If Christ be not risen, Christians are petty temple-schismatics, justly cast out of the law. Worse things have befallen Israel. But since he is risen, he is risen even for these high-handed underlings of self- worship: who, as by obedience, proclaim him risen indeed. LXVII Instruct me further in your travail, blind interpreter. Suppose I cannot unearth what it was they buried: research is not anamnesis. Nor is this a primer of innocence exactly. Did the centurion see nothing irregular before the abnormal light seared his eyeballs? Why do I take as my gift a wounded and wounding introspection? The rule is clear enough: last alleluias forte, followed by indifferent coffee and fellowship. LXIX What choice do you have? These are false questions. Fear is your absolute, yet in each feature infinitely variable, Manichean beyond dispute, for you alone, the skeletal maple, a loose wire tapping the wind. LXX Active virtue: that which shall contain its own passion in the public weal— do you follow?—or can you at least take the drift of the thing? The struggle for a noble vernacular: this did not end with Petrarch. But where is it? Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case, with Dryden, or, perhaps, Milton’s political sonnets?—the cherished stock hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices of distinction, far back, indistinct. Still, I’m convinced that shaping, voicing, are types of civic action. Or, slightly to refashion this, that Wordsworth’s two Prefaces stand with his great tract on the Convention of Cintra, witnessing to the praesidium in the sacred name of things betrayed.Intrinsic value I am somewhat less sure of. It seems implicate with active virtue but I cannot say how, precisely. Partaking of both fact and recognition, it must be, therefore, in effect, at once agent and predicate: imponderables brought home to the brute mass and detail of the world; there, by some, to be pondered. XCVI Ignorant, assured, there comes to us a voice— Unchallengeable—of the foundations, distinct authority devoted to indistinction. With what proximity to justice stands the record of mischance, heroic hit-or-miss, the air so full of flak and tracer, legend says, you pray to live unnoticed. M r Ives took Emersonian self-reliance the whole way on that. Melville, half-immolated, rebuilt the pyre. Holst, some time later, stumbled on dharma. What can I say?— At worst and best a blind ennoblement, flood-water, hunched, shouldering at the weir, the hatred that is in the nature of love. CXVIII By default, as it so happens, here we have good and bad angels caught burning themselves characteristic antiphons; and here the true and the false shepherds discovered already deep into their hollow debate. Is that all? No, add spinners of fine calumny, confectioners of sugared malice; add those who find sincerity in heartless weeping. Add the pained, painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition. Sidney: best realizer and arguer of music, that ‘divine striker upon the senses’, steady my music to your Augustinian grace-notes, with your high craft of fret. I am glad to have learned how it goes with you and with Italianate- Hebraic Milton: your voices pitched exactly— somewhere—between Laus Deo and defiance. CXIX And yes—bugger you, MacSikker et al.,—I do mourn and resent your desolation of learning: Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure, forms of understanding, far from despicable, and furthest now, as they are most despised. By understanding I understand diligence and attention, appropriately understood as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement of what is owed the dead. CXX As with the Gospels, which it is allowed to resemble, in Measure for Measure moral uplift is not the issue. Scrupulosity, diffidence, shrill spirituality, conviction, free expression, come off as poorly as deceit or lust. The ethical motiv is—so we may hazard— opportunism, redemptive and redeemed; case-hardened on case-law, casuistry’s own redemption; the general temper a caustic equity. CXXI So what is faith if it is not inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns are breast-high, head-high, the days lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder. Light is this instant, far-seeing into itself, its own signature on things that recognize salvation. I am an old man, a child, the horizon is Traherne’s country. CXLVII To go so far with the elaborately- vested Angel of Naked Truth: and where are we, finally? Don’t say that—we are nowhere finally. And nowhere are you— nowhere are you—any more—more cryptic than a schoolyard truce. Cry Kings, Cross, or Crosses, cry Pax, cry Pax, but to be healed. But to be healed, and die! CXLVIII Obnoxious means, far back within itself, easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud anger is, I find, a related self of covetousness. I came late to seeing that. Actually, I had to be shown it. What I saw was rough, and still pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more. Pride is our crux: be angry, but not proud where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi’s words or—to be accurate—BV’s English cast of them: when he found Tasso’s poor scratch of a memorial barely showing among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It seemed a sad and angry consolation. So—Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem—I ask you: what are poems for? They are to console us with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch. Let us commit that to our dust. What ought a poem to be? Answer,a sad and angry consolation.