Back to Nothing But a Face index
Previous poem
FIVE POEMS ON ECSTASY
I
'The colour is stunning' but why
should we want to be stunned?
Why should we want
to be 'carried away'?
wanting somehow - anyhow -
to be stopped
dead in our tracks, to be
deprived (even momentarily)
of all
responsibility?
Why should we
long to be -
why should we like
being - hypnotised?
Images following
one after the other
in front of our eyes.
Doesn't all the activity
of the day lead
to the moment
in the evening when we
can be 'captivated'?
When we
can cease to be? while still
seeing?
a seeing machine?
And this is why we drink
and why we smoke
dope and shoot
smack and maybe even
'make love', this being
our daily suicide. I have declared
elsewhere that prayer
is 'the end of everything'
but no. This -
the pit where prayer
becomes impossible - is
(Jim Morrison dixit)
the end, my friend.
II
'Making love' - a strange
expression, as if we model
love with our hands
like artisans.
I had a lover (another
strange concept -
lover, baker, candlestick maker)
once, whose skill
was almost craftsmanlike
but was
what he was making
love? Was it the love
that God is?
There was a generosity there,
a devotion, a kindness even, but
I was reduced
to nothing, that nothing
that imagines itself
to be everything.
I was annihilated
blissfully,
ceasing to be - and so
ceasing to be
an object of love.
It is of course
in the aftermath
that something human -
something friendly -
can take place, but
(Tina Turner dixit) what's love
got to do with it?
The love that embraces a family?
The love that embraces the poor?
III
Rilke in the 7th Duino Elegy, is he
disagreeing with me?
Is he saying that ecstasy,
which I see as annihilation,
is a fulness of being?
Likening it indeed
to Chartres?
He who in the 5th Duino Elegy wrote
(Robert Hass dixit)
the most eloquent indictment of fucking?
But maybe Hass is wrong.
Maybe Rilke
is not being ironic.
Maybe he believes that there,
'right down upon the carpet' the dead
really could
rise from the grave
as Samson (6th Elegy)
springs from the womb.
But I am with Kierkegaard.
The gods (and Rilke's angel
and his stone
face in the desert,
are only gods) may love,
care for, and therefore
torture the hero, but God
doesn't love anyone -
not even the saints - more
than anyone else, doesn't admire
anyone - 'for in Thy sight
shall no man living
be justified'.
God is love and hence
fulness of being.
The concepts are inseparable because
what can be loved other than what is
and what can Love
with a capital 'L' love other
than everything?
Equally? and yet
the lover is not
the beloved and so
fulness of being is not
everything that is
and Consciousness with a capital 'C' is not
what it is conscious of.
We too, at our own level,
love and are conscious and so
are something other
than everything that is,
and that is how we
peculiarly
had God's spirit breathed into us,
and how
we can participate in
that fulness of being
that is not but
nonetheless embraces
everything that is.
IV
Which is
a bit of a call
and yet
maybe not,
for what is the Universe
if it is not us?
What is a colour
without an eye?
What is a sound
without an ear?
We imagine that before
we appeared on the scene
there was something, of course,
but what?
What is a television signal
without a television?
What is the Universe
in all its enormity
to God, but
a potency?
And what is the consciousness
of animals but
the beginnings of a realisation
as the Universe
acquires a form
as the signal in
the television screen?
And what was the breath
breathed into us
peculiarly
if it was not
the possibility
of Love?
The love that torments us
day, in day out, in a way
no animal is tormented.
For no-one imagines
we can be content
to smoke
dope and shoot
smack and maybe even
'make love' -
with our wars, our
revolutions, our vast,
all-consuming ambitions.
We long, always,
everywhere for
a realisation
- a love, not for everything that is
but for what
isn't yet,
a category that,
in consciousness with a capital 'C',
isn't.
V
For to say 'time is' means,
it might seem, that being
isn't. Unless
Consciousness with a capital 'C'
embraces time - in which case
our becoming
is already.
It's just a matter of knowing
- participating, not
becoming, not wanting, and that,
dear reader, is prayer,
like a collection of Russian dolls
participating each in the other, right down
from big St Nicholas
to little me. Right down from
Consciousness with a capital 'C'
to little
St Nicholas.
And prayer doesn't create
that interlocking -
it reveals. Oh you silly
Nicholas Berdyaev, it isn't
creation that we want but
revelation - the revelation of what
always, gloriously, is.