It occurred to Him that the perfection whereof he was the Cognizant
Comptroller might be more interesting if set in motion. A slight swirl,
perhaps: something gentle, along an elliptical path.
(Such an impulse, of course, expresses a Flaw in God's consciousness,
or perhaps only an extra electron in the whole, or--it may be--the
infinite tedium of Infinity; most likely of all, the idea that
Perfection is predictably unpredictable.)
Anyhow--one deduced that He gave all His electrons and His positrons a
twist. Naturally, there followed an explosion. Naturally, this puffed
Space into existence, to make room for itself.
(Out went the windows, the doors, and the walls.)
It follows that a fragment was a writer in the pre-Sanskrit tongues,
and another was Abbé le Maître.
Of course--we want to be God's Little Helpers, wee bits of Him, and
put it back together again so as to become Timeless composites of His
Awareness.
Shall we, therefore, on the epochal day when the island universes start
homing, be wise enough to rejoice?
When brighter, brighter, brighter glows the firmament?
When night becomes as day, and day as a blast furnace?
(Or--will the infalling clots by then be cold and ourselves so drowned
and immobilized at the bottoms of hydrocarbon oceans as to be already
avid for one more experimental whirl?)
Think why you fornicate! Is it not to bring together again these
thunderous, silent fires? To perform your little, local reassertion of
the reburgeoning I-am-so-God-is?
Look at the stars! What suitable illumination shines for love from
every pretty pore of heaven!
Look at the city! The noisiest palaver of tenement, of factory and
store--the talked-up edifices that speak back anathema--(removed some
ways, or in some degree) lose their ugliness. Even they are like the
stars which are beauty at a distance and might be beautiful close
up--if you knew how to see, there.
Heat's haze--night's dark--snow--the gentle perspectives.
Look at the night!
The infernal Jersey shore battled the oblivion with Mazda bulbs, neon,
sizzling arcs, and the globe's shadow eliminated all but beauty.
Lights swam on the river. Antediluvian animals with pairs of red-green
eyes swam up and down the Hudson. Fish from the abyss--mammoth--with
ladders of light along their shining sides surfaced and sloshed in the
current, hooting and humming. Ah, Jersey! Fields of phosphorescent
flowers and hills set out with lantern-bearing trees! Night-blooming
paradise! The magic is our own--collective. What matter that beneath
one particular lavender string of streetlights mad boys pitch clinking
pennies--curse--push frowsy, young, reluctant girls up alleyways--and
mad, obscene old men tipple in bars that reek with millenniums of human
hellishness--and mad, subpersonal old women maliciously fling slops in
the yards of their neighbors? This is not the one man but his panorama.
For can they not, all of them, stinking of their sweat and overswarming
with diseased intent, look east across their river and see a pattern
of illumination that would have made Nero hang himself with envy and
Rameses change his gods?
Manhattan!
They look. Great Heaven, they never see!
Directly below, on the sidewalk, a woman went one by one through the
circular pools of street light. I could hear her heels crossing my life
and every time she reached a new radiant circle I could see she had
golden hair. The very beasts in the river ceased boasting to let her
print the small, enchanting sound of woman's passage on the attentive
dark. Her dress was green.