Señor Despaïr


Against a Hopeless Time


2. The Voice

A drop of mercury pools on the horizon;
a pale bruised piece of sky fading above it,
and, curling from a darkness that has been only murmuring and night surf,
I think I can see the old man 
in his old world summer suit, 
in silent profile, bowed before me.
  			   	        “I think,”
I say, stumbling over the words, I have been silent
so long: “I think . . . maybe it . . .”
The old man seems not to hear me. “. . . maybe . . . it 
isn’t as it seems to you: only horrifying.” 

He appears to raise his head. “This you think . . . ?”
he says, in a voice soft as an owlet’s down.

“Yes,” says my voice,
surprising me, for some reason. “The world . . .  
the world, with all . . . its cruelty, chaos, its
brutal banality . . . that . . . everything you say is true. At
    least
it meets my own experience like the two ragged edges 
of a broken bone: 
the stupidity and the suffering, so much of the suffering 
caused by the stupidity (I have learned that lesson only 
too well)—the world has . . .” the voice stops; a number of 
hopelessly inadequate words beat like trapped birds inside
    my brain,
trying to escape.

“Has what”? the old man asks.

“. . . a fascination.”

I bite the inside of my lip, waiting for the laughter 
to crow over my insufficiency,
though the silence is tart as sarcasm.

“A fascination,” he says, expressionlessly. “Una fascinación. With what?”

“With the wonders. With 
the magnificence. 
From the smallest wave, 
the tiniest of particles,
flickering, radiant, from the black hole’s sucking zero
to the scattering spore of stars, the scudding black backs
of galaxies in their nets of dust, and who knows what
endless shoals of universes raised around us,
across or through us, even, in a time and space
beyond infinity, forever
shaming the clichés of eternity 
like toys cast off from a suburban nursery, 
and presenting us with a terrifying glory,
serene grandeurs shining between tempests we never
    beguiled
in our mythologies, yet that may be only a poor man’s
weak trial at conceiving a reality so far
beyond us it must make us worshipful
of the world that created us, not we the world: 
a world beyond our quaint ideas of ‘eternity’ and ‘god’ 
as those were, have been, beyond us, any, ever or now:  
yet nothing here more true. 

“We live at the heart
of divinity without beginning or end,
and this divinity is the world.
We just did not know it before so . . .  definitively.
It has nothing to do with God—it is beyond God.”

“It is beyond Satan, you mean,” the old man’s voice says,
    softly.
“It is a beautiful thought. Un pensamiento hermoso! 
But it is only a thought.

“We do not live in the manors of the universe,
but in a hole where we sweat to make lives
in fear and cold, imagining a fire that does not warm us,
surrounded by rivals, in danger of defeat and shame, 
friendships lost for inscrutable reasons,
disease, old age, poverty, self-disgust, 
failing to get little or nothing of what, or of who, 
we most desire. That desire itself—nuestro propio
    deseo—
walls us from the enchantment: that loveliest of women,
esa brillante carrera, respect, admiration, love,
except in doses tan pequeño they are almost insults: proofs
of what we cannot possess. 
                                            When, despite fate, 
you grasp a trophy 
of granted longing, the envy of ‘friends’
who will not forgive your shabby, little reward, 
poisons the air.
Wealth, fame, power, love are shelterless
from the envious—as our own envy
wounds our lives for triumphs we have missed
and feel we have earned, with justice or without.

“Fate is a pyramid staring down at its climbers,
haughty and cold. 
Success itself is shameful
if it means another’s defeat. But that is how it works,
this glorious world you are so romantic about:
for every beauty you see, a thousand uglinesses
have danced in tears and blood.
You think you can try again, that the door is always open.
But the door finally closes, or has been always closed;
it only seemed ajar.
La vida es una ilusión fabulosa, invented to keep you
moving ahead in hope, deceiving but ever renewed,
desperate worm on cunning hook.”

		                                       The moon
crests the horizon, its face
of cartoon sorrow, round and full as a baby’s,
glows its bright silvery porcelain in the blackness,
yet as though lamenting everything it sees.

“With all due respect, señor”—He bows in the opening
    moonlight.—
“don’t you think you go too far? Don’t you think 
maybe you are offending 
the miracle?” 

		The old man does not move.
But after a moment I think I hear a gently spoken 
question: “Miracle, mi hijo? Que milagro?”
   
                      “The miracle 
of this shabby, this shameful, this dubious life.
By all the laws of chemistry, biology, physics,
relativity, quantum mechanics,
and all the dead-end sciences you laugh at and despise,
it should not have happened at all. 
So, what if this
world 
is the miracle we have sought? 
Our life—bricolage theater for oblivion—
a smudge of ash in the next geological stratum,
a hiccup in a random turn of evolution’s wheel,
until the sun
grows fat and red and devours the earth,
or, shriveling into a kind of icy kernel, freezes it,
or explodes and stars a far-off night
for an hour brighter than the galaxy—
what if that is the miracle? 
                                               But not 
certain is any of this, and the presumption that we 
are able to know 
what it is impossible to know—
the future in the furthest meaning of the term—
is a peculiar crime of the human mind,
thinking it a venial sin;
and, since we squirm recalling thoughtless hopes
that broke in our hands like eggshells
and left our mouths acrid and bitter,
We choose to tell ourselves dark, harsh, 
cold and despairing truths, in order to avoid
another brutal disappointment. But the same
compulsion drives us: the craving to know—
the need for knowledge when only ignorance,
uncertainty, and darkness are to be found,
for all of us are children 
before the unknowable.  
			   Maybe it is true we are
little more than nourishment for oblivion—maybe 
it is not: we do not know either way. 
We may have faith
that, since we are here, now, and have
in a little way thrived,
the world is not absolutely against us
or our somewhat abrupt arrival at the party.
We can go further.” The voice pauses. How
preposterous all of this sounds!
But the voice goes on. The old man
has not moved. “It supports us—it
encourages, shields, shelters, defends,
holds us,
holds us upright,
is us.
We are an expression of its power,
we also;
of the power that builds sense, life,
mind, good, beauty, grace,
against the power
arrayed against us: brutality, stupidity, destruction, 
    and death.
The power that poisons the air. And it is our work
to aid another power, the one that holds us 
    in its hand . . .”

“But that is where the poison works
to most penetrating effect,” the old man 
breaks in, smiling softly. 
“Exactamente en el corazón y el alma y la mente—
in the heart, and soul, and mind—
that you extoll so extáticamente.  There the monster god,
loco, lunático, imbécil, aleatorio, brutal,
works at his most cruel. Life,
la vida es la bestia: life is the monster
that feeds on life, that digs down
to undermine meaning and joy—
a miracle indeed! Milagro satánico.

“It was human intelligence that worked out entropy,
thus putting an end, irónicamente, to eschatology—
the study of final things!—
even better than the sainted Darwin.

“What does science reveal? The dimensions of our prison. 
Have no fear! There is no escape.
The human brain has proven that the human brain
is an accident, and thus proves nothing—
more: it is an aberración that spins out fantasies
it feeds on and must believe in: reality
is ultimately not even—cómo se dice? disponible—
available to us.

“We crave for something we cannot have—
so numb ourselves with games and drugs
and art and music and philosophy and literature and religion and wealth and power 
 	y el lujo y el sexo—
anything to escape the intolerable gnawing.”

Beneath the moon an immensely long, glittering spear of
    light
reaches across the ocean to the horizon,
as if pointing toward the darkness. 
	
		    	        	        “But aren’t we free,”
the voice in me replies, 
“to make, to find, meaning and value and good?
Haven’t we escaped many a horror of the past, 
haven’t we earned the right to hope?”

“We are free, es verdad, of the artificial vise,
so now we can see the more natural chains,”
the old man, patient as a professor 
to a new student (but not unpromising!) explains,
“That piping Emerson, that windbag Whitman—
what did it lead to? Democracia, la libertad, 
America! Look at it, remember it:
there is a country that has no excuses—
and what has it done?

“Mira! A nation half mad with greed, power-lust, pride,
a foolish, arrogant culture that parades 
ugliness in the name of libertad de expresión,
an infantile denial of unflattering truths,
a contempt for reality, a hatred of fact,
an economy verdaderamente hell-bent 
on next quarter’s gain
even if it leads to the destruction of mankind,
civilization, and most of life on earth,
as long as the shareholders get theirs,
and I get mine! I don’t care! I’ll be dead,
with my assault rifles lining my coffin!

“And not America alone:
this cultura de nada has spread like a bacillus
por todo el mundo.
We are locked inside a wallet inside a rocket, and we will
    ride it
until it explodes against its target: we
are a nation of winners!
We must win!
Even in the race to suicide.”

“But what if the game isn’t over? 
What if we are midway through? What 
if we are merely at the beginning? 
Maybe we are steeped in evil like a cheap teabag, 
unable to love anything but ourselves, 
and cannot love even ourselves without hating,
no truth in us without a companion lie,
and the impossible thing is to face ourselves
without pity or rancor.”

“Yet what,” says the voice, “if it is possible, 
and when we dissect our bitter heart, 
the human dazzles with angels
we had no right to hope for. . . . I have names. . . .”

“I know them. I do not deny them. Even
as history's pages are bloody with crimes
of evil men, the margins are often 
mágicamente ilustrado: las horas muy ricas 
of many a bloody chronicle
displays an art of such delicadeza, such gentleness,
such sensibilidad, like soft music
tender as a kiss, and a warm poesía
that makes one love the creature that could
dream up such beauty—la belleza,
which is nothing but el amor encarnado—
how do you say?—the bodying forth of love.

“How can one not love a creature so able
to love?” 

	    The moon has risen, and as it rose, 
seemed to shrink, as if squeezed
into a bubble of white light
that might any moment break and vanish
splintering into ashes among brittle stars 
across the blackness.

“But the newspapers are not littered with prodigies of
    love—
not even the screens of our chosen addictions
or the next sensation to leap, fully armed, from the brain,
collective or garage-bound, of Silicon Valley.
What drives us, drives us, is evil’s fascination,
in love, in hate, in crime, in war: 
these flatter us—only power, 
only sovereign power, leaves behind such wreckage,
What we fear more than meaninglessness
is impotence. We fear 
the hand we cannot raise into a fist
and crush, if we wanted; when we don’t, we pretend 
it is the ‘in hoc signo vinces’
of our sovereignty.  
                       But even we are not fooled. 
Every so often we must prove. 
Prove what? And to whom? 
To ourselves. That we can destroy any foe of our will. 
Every so often? Cómo! Every hour.

“So we lap up stories of manmade horrors
with a double satisfaction: such power! such virtue!
They thrill us with our strength and our righteous
    condemnation, 
evils we then get to sovereignly disdain. 
A clever trick by a monkey with too many brains!”

“What drives us on is love and fear,
like bees in a swarm,”
the voice within me says, speaking aloud,
both me and not me:
“more love than fear, or you have forgotten:
love of life itself, its darkness and brilliance,
smell, flavor, touch, color,
sound: the flick of a breeze, the green
of grass, the hues and tints of wild flowering,
the microtones of light that each moment
sweep across our eyes, the fragrance
of language—if you have not smelled language,
you have not breathed at all—it intoxicates the mouth, 
the ear, the mind,  the teasing licks of music
that make your being quiver, 
the taut trembling that is the body
in pleasure, thrown at all times, even in pain,
the exaltation of the mind in seizing
at discovery,
sensation, assent, refusal, the dry
stimulus, the moist indulgence, the tart burst
on the palate, the bitter edge that makes the spine tingle, 
the dream of happiness
at the heart of love’s dream, the pool of bliss
we live at the bottom of
without knowing until it is suddenly drained,
and then our happiness is all nostalgia—we own
the uncanny ability to take the worst 
of living and make out of it a thing
of goodness, beauty, truth, triumph,
a refusal to be cowed by history, nature,
death, fate—we will defy, I will defy
all odds and snatch from brutal fact
life, we will build the city
of happiness, chanting our gratitude for a world
that spun us out of light, dust, time,
and the faith our ignorance hides from us, a wisdom
we never see exactly but that we
are held by, like a child in its arms.

“We need fear nothing, for there is nothing to fear.

“Death? Death is nothing. We belong
to the cosmos, not ourselves,”
the voice speaks on, seems drunk, almost 
to sing. “The cosmos
is forever, is infinite. We have no words,
no mathematics equal to it. 
Understand it? Good luck!
Have faith in it. It made, formed you. Its heart 
cannot be lost; 
however far you try to throw it away.” 

		     	                       A cloud
eats the moon, and the air grows black as ink,
the sky a gigantic octopus. 
The old man’s whites 
vanish, and the tide, risen, weaves the cries
of crashing waves like the wails of sinners punished
in the hell of their salvationlessness.

“There is no cosmos, there is nada mayor de lo que somos, 
there are only the shadows of the cave.”
The old man’s voice almost disappears into the waves.
I strain to listen. “We live in a shell
that floats like a bubble among fatuidades,
curtains of darkness
pretending they are light,
a light revealing nothing, that can 
reveal nothing except our illusions 
and the depth of our solitude.

“A bizarre aberration
is life in a universe otherwise 
el antagonista absoluto a la vida: cosmology
is an unending slap in the face of hope.

“We cannot even find life’s possibility,
let alone a piece of it—say, just a planet
unas bacterias, an asteroid de baba de estanque, what do you call, “pond slime”;
a world of insects, fungus, rats—
but not anything, as Euclid sweeps the sky,
like Hubble cojeando—no: hobbling Hubble!—before it,
weighing exoplanetas on hope’s duplicitous scales;
then probing Webb, examining droplets of galaxies
at the earliest edge of the big bang.
The universe is más grande, más asombrosa,
más hermoso, más sublime
than was ever dreamed in the stale dreams of the poets—
la poesía (what childishness is hidden in those sweet
    sounds!)
La imaginación is a weak phantom compared to la
     realidad.
The universe not even one, but multiple!
Does nature ever create the unique, the never seen before
    or ever again?
No! She makes only families, 
in molds (as Plato knew!) that form individuals!
Families of existence! Si! And therefore:
El universo no es un universo!
But only one of many, un infinito—
uno de millones of bubbles on a sea
without beginning or end, forever.

“The only true poets of our time are the cosmologists!

“But that is speculation. El universo
is not especially kind
or altogether welcoming to life—even though she
(cruel and generous as a woman!)
even though she invented it! 
She is like an intoxicated genius, full of brilliance,
marijuana, whisky and crack cocaine, 
throwing off creations a la derecha, a la izquierda, 
and not caring where her numberless seeds fall
or where her children are orphaned:
she is too busy creating
to give two damns about protecting:
let the curators and the archivists worry about that!

“A child today has more power at his fingertips
than Apollo, a teenager can rival Zeus
in havoc, a nation can wipe life from the face of the earth
like Yahweh in his prime.
La ciencia, la tecnología
have given us a scrap of knowledge, wealth
and power—el conocimiento, la riqueza, y el poder!—
that no one before us has ever conceived,
not for kings, not even gods—nosotros somos los dioses!
We now are the gods!

“Yet every extension of our power
laughs at us, scorns and mocks us, since all it shows
is, irónicamente, how weak we are, cómo, al final, somos
    impotentes:
subject to the limits of time, energy, matter,
a brief espiga of a kind of energía
cristalizada embracing its own extinction
in its flame. We have, cómo se dice, borró—erased
la trascendencia—transcendence;
we have assassinated la Gran Esperanza
for the sake of pequeñas pequeñas esperanzas
that lead to nothing. A terrible price,
Doctor Faust, you have paid for your conquests!
Your world is una montaña poderosa, taller than
    Everest—
a mountain made of powder, of victorias pírricas.”

The old man pauses, shaking his head
in delicate disgust. 

               “Outside our little bubble of a blue planet
and its elegant technology, how long does it take
for a living being to perish? 
En un minuto, si tiene suerte. 
En dos minutos, si no tiene suerte!
The antagonism of the stars
is woven into our blood, our bones 
are crystals of it, our thoughts fractures of its dust.
No: there is little glory in being human, mi hermano—
our gifts of skill, insight, invention
merely reveal the hopelessness of our case
in exquisite and eloquent detail. 

“Each day—each hour—bears proof
of our inanity and the emptiness 
of the enormous stage we act on. 
The evidence is overwhelming, as the lawyers say
in their eloquent closing statement: you have no choice,
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, but to convict!”

The old man grins like a wrinkled Puck 
or a moonwashed skull. 
The moon hangs straight overhead, small, 
like a dirty street light.

			  “That is the world’s mistake, 
and ours as well, but only in so far
as it is a mistake,” the voice inside me responds,
shouting (or so it sounds to me), against this empty storm 
of words. 
      “You seem to hate science, you despise 
technology, and maybe we, maybe I, 
have placed too much faith in them,
was too impressed, forgot the glass pedestals they 
    stand on,
brittle, easily seen through:
they cannot even justify themselves! They dazzle,
flatter, blind us—but we, each of us, I
decide how much 
respect I give them. When they tell me I have 
no soul, no self, but only a parade of delusions
of continuity over time, this delusion reminds them
who is master. Humanity created them; 
humanity can destroy them.
I, master of the plug and the switch,
command them.
Science the truth? You make me laugh.
Science knows nothing—all it does
is push back further the horizon of our ignorance
with inspired guesses it can never prove. 
Yet he is my servant
and brilliantly performs in his sphere;
though the moment he betrays me,
I stick him in his place, like any irritated god:
kindly, for he can’t help being a bit of an ‘idiot 
    savant'; 
but incontestably.

“At times his discoveries are painful yet needed,
such as the ridiculous design of the human brain,
the intelligent cortex jerrybuilt on top of a monumentally
    blockheaded
cerebrum on an overexcited reptilian brain stem which
can barely wait to wreak havoc, kill its neighbor, and mate
with the nearest bit of skin,
to say nothing of the atrociously worked out developmental scheme
of the human male. . . .”

			    “You are beginning
to sound like me!” the old man laughs. “But, por favor, 
do go on. Perdóname por mi interrupción.’’

“Only the better to defeat you, viejo!
At times it illuminates a necessary fact
we need to learn—even a fact so beautiful
it opens our sense of the immensity,
the boundless variety that is reality;
and then it is a savior we need not crucify
to deliver us from evil.

“But sometimes it only wrecks our dignity and hope
for the sake of its pride—
or rather the pride of scientists—in the endless 
juggling for status, dominance, power,
brief as they are and illusory as smoke.
But as soon as we recall that we invented them,
that they are subject
to our will—science, technology, scientists, geeks!—
their power evaporates like so many nightmares at dawn.

“And this is true for all the human world:
it has no power over us we do not give it—
that I do not give it—and it is subject
at every moment to my power’s withdrawal.”

“We are lost with them!” The old man
is cackling wildly. “Why do you think we are flying
toward annihilation, hurtling toward
the world’s ending and the human Armageddon:
ecological catastrophe on all fronts,
smothering the world in a cloud
of chemicals that exist nowhere else
en todo el universo, invented to make life
more convenient for our sweet selves,
or to kill all those creatures huddling
between us and our domination of the earth,
or even so much as whim 
(‘Mosquitoes? Oh my! What a nuisance? Kill them all!’)
and the holocaust of species and the coming of artificial
    intelligence
that is likely to find us (oh poetic justice!) equally
    irritating
(‘Humans? Oh my! What a nuisance! Kill them all!’)
and then there is always the possibility of nuclear war en
    cualquier momento
(how boringly last century! But it could still kill everyone!)

“The clock is ticking,
and it is almost midnight! La ciencia?
La tecnología? You think you control them?
Please excuse me while I die laughing! . . .”

“Then die and be quick about it. When I find myself
at loggerheads with my fellow humans,"
says the voice within,
“and they assert a power—like these!—that I deny,
I escape into the world:
my chain of consequence, immediate to transcendence,
holds me beyond defeat or death,
against, if need be, the world. And it often
‘need be’ indeed!
For much of, if not all, the world’s evils you dwell on
lie in the human will to conquer
anything but itself; command
where it was meant to serve and save, 
triumph
where it was meant to bind in kindness,
to dominate where domination is a mirage
and every mountain is made of nothing more
than mist and wind.
The only human triumph, lone victory
for us, for me, is in the breath of a thought:
knowing where the diamonds of being shimmer,
where to whisper into the ear of the god
whose name is one behind the wall of night 
and the eternal chaos of things.

“I hand my faith to it
like a ball of twine in a labyrinth, 
whose end is in my heart.

“When I do thus, my heart and it join;
the only friend I know,
though it sound insolent to say so. . . . 
But that is the way to treat your god.
You will, naturally, not wish to offend 
or grieve or wound the one you love,
who so loves you . . .”

The moon has vanished behind impenetrable cloud.
Nothing now spreads across the sky
like a dust rag, wiping the stars away 
like crumbs.
The white noise of the waves roars monotonously on.

“Your idea is beautifully mystical, my young friend,"
the old man’s patient voice comes out of the blackness.
“I envy you your faith in one
where all I see is el caos de las cosas y del tiempo—
a chaos of things and time. I feel, I admit,
what little order there seems to be is the illusion,
and chaos and the void are the final reality of all;
not order, mind, love, not even hate;
just blind energy and violence tossing
back and forth between each other and boredom, 
like an infinite barracks in a post for reserves in a guerra
perpetua. We need fairy tales to cheer us, 
or drugs of other kinds, from cabernet to canabis, mezcal 
    to ecstasy,
ambition for wealth, fame—art, status, power. There is
nothing to meet the deepest of our necesidades humanas:
para la vida, la juventud y el amor forever!
We are perhaps the only living thing
that has needs that cannot be met:
we spend our lives seeking a food that does not exist—
and so we pursue sustitutos 
irremediablemente inadecuados.
A paradox!

“But we are the paradoxical animal,
and turn on Ixion’s wheel in our torments
till we pass out in a delicious dream of escaping,

waking up only to discover that escape was a cruel 
illusion;
we are fastened still to the rolling wheel.
To be born a human being is the most terrible fate of all.”

“Why have you lived so long?” the voice in me asks
the voice in the darkness. “If human life is so terrible,
why do you live? As the stoics said,
each has a quick escape, with a little, brief courage.”

The darkness sighs and seems almost to smile.
“Touché, my young and clever friend!
You are right! If I find existence
so dreadful and pointless, why not end it—
my own, at least—and put me out, like a broken horse,
of my misery? It would be, at least, more honest,
and take but a small moment of bravery.

“I do not have a good answer for you.
Inertia? Habit? Cowardice? or that little hope . . .
ese pequeño fragmento de esperanza—I have not 
yet flushed from my system,
the hope that someone—who knows! maybe you!—
    will prove me 
wrong. 
              My espíritus animales are incorrigible optimists,
they only believe what they want to believe
however I try to reason with them. They are convinced
    that,
in the end, they will—cómo se dice?—
disprove the numbers—
the numbers that never lie! Ay de mí!
They are like the man falling from the airplane who 
    believes
that something will catch him—that something must catch 
    him—
a flock of condors! an off-course hang glider! the last MAX 787!
a flight of angels from paradise!—
before he hits the ground. 

“Hard as I try, I can’t argue myself into nonexistence
despite all the cunning gambits of la razón
and the logic that leads inexorably to the only
possible conclusion.

“I feel ridiculous because I am ridiculous:
a nihilist, it would seem, who still wishes to live.
Por favor . . . por favor . . .” I think I hear him kneel
down on the sand. 
“Por favor: prove me wrong, so I will feel less absurd.”

The irony in his voice is like a plea;
in the invisible smile I see tears,
beneath the arrogance, the intellectual pride,
an angry child crying in the night,
a child I had known, for I had been
that child, alone in the silence,
alone in the dark and dreaming of a love
that had long withdrawn into ice.

The voice within me nevertheless responded.
“I cannot prove anything, I do not know anything.
What I have is doubt at war with trust 
that, however terrible the future is—
the humanly wrought and administered hell
we re-create with each new generation—
the madness of our dance of wealth and death,
our feverish vulgarity and chronic bad faith,
the shabbiness and disgust of daily life,
the greed and cowardice and self-deceit
(beside which mere falsehoods are almost quaint)
that paralyze us as we destroy
the life we know, the life we have known, 
the life we believed was possible,
and prepare our destruction
with the lunatic conscientiousness of an army corps of
    demons—
to say nothing of the insults of disease and age,
the cruelty of the diseased mind, the self-
defeating brutality of crime and war—
despite all these—even, in some way
because of them—the evils they define
define this good: 
to conquer them,
to make
out of this mud, these stones,
out of the wrath of these seas,

a happiness,

a kindness,

a delight,

a deep contentment in each other and ourselves,

a purpose for life so obvious one laughs, tickled\
(“How blind not to have seen it all this time!”);

out of the coldness of infinite space, 
crossing the violence of infinite time,
a safe and warm and intimate home for joy and for love.

Your love, my love, our love.

“For we are clever monkeys.
Can we deepen cleverness into wisdom,
learn the shifting balance 
of love and freedom, liberty and reverence
(none can bear life without safety,
though safety become a cage;
no breath’s worth drawing without liberty,
though it imperils all that lives;
too much safety is a prison,
too much freedom is hell),
and make of the blue globe a manor
inside which lives a home
for life in its darkling splendor,
bright birth and the payment of death
for the infinite debt of being?
And crush and mold cold despair
into grist for creation’s mills?

“Build, make, form, mold
worlds in unending creation.
Sing so softly you only can hear.
Let your heart dance
in the mouth of the lion. 
   For the creator
of this, of us, though hidden
from us as the lion is hidden
from its fleas, the wilderness from its wolves—
though everything we see is nothing
but, of it, an emanation
in love with its creation
no less than the dancer
is in love with her dancing—
loving, critical, demanding more:
truer delicacy, braver truth, 
deeper beauty—sometimes turning
all creation inside out
from a monstrous curiosity—
yet in love forever with the dance.

“Like that paradigm of inspired impracticality,
a poet, idealist who sacrifices his hours
inventing a few pearled strings of words 
that meet his highly personal terms
of the good and beautiful and true,
though yielding small fame,
little wealth, no power—
just fleeting breath
of a serene affirmation
that is lost a breath later,
and a strange pride that keeps his head high
though humankind else shrugs, puzzled,
suspicious, and disdainful. 

“The world is such a poet, such a dancer:
an obsessive creator spinning patterns 
from clouds.

“All that is, will be, has been, 
will have been beyond the end of time.
We have, I have, this moment—
this moment—now.
That may be the only immortality.
Our work is at the end of the world’s hands.

“Like earth, coal into diamond, we
hold, squeeze, burn darkness into light.

In my mind I hold the universe 
like a jewel in my hand,
from immense grandeur
to tiniest refinement; host
the tent of the circus of being—

for, do not forget, phantom of despair:
in her wild gentleness,
delicacy, power,
to infinity, through eternity, she lives.

“Thus I, thus you,
despite the mask and miserliness 
of slippery time and granite space,
my destiny to decay and death, your
compulsive follies, my grotesqueness,
your unfathomable evil, the
appearance we proffer to the stars’ 
dead laughter, of being so much
the illegitimate progeny of mud and the divine—
I, beaten, broken, by hate, by fear, injustice, death,
was, am, shall be,
a god’s—however he disowns me—
child.”

The darkness was at its deepest. The voice within
sounded strange, hollow, as though
alone in an empty room. 

_____

Christopher Bernard’s most recent collection of poems is titled The Beauty of Matter, “A Pagan’s Verses for a Mystic Idler.” Señor Despaïr will appear in book form from Real Magazine Productions, a publisher based in India, later this year.