Visions

Let's take a sampling of the baffling torrent of images that come out of a single night. Like looking through a photo album. Pictures of dark iron fences relieved against trees in the backgorund. Beyond that: brick. Here are the arrays of my own psychic currents: here my sundered life. Here my brother dances with wolves, but even the wolves are tame even tohugh he does not know it. Here are the three women: one the quentessence of softness ready to envelop and protect, all couch cushions and hands held, all the marvel at the dancing star, all puppetry and acceptances and long walks; one is the ringletted hardness of chthonic past--seductive and fascinating, the spirit of the streetcars, the song of the hardened steel beams under the railway bridge, the blast of colossal speakers in graffitti-speckled little rooms; the third: the woman of the orange rays of setting sun, darkened over with cataracts in her old age, rocking by the fire and taking up the call from the book of Yeats' poetry, vast quilts at her lap and feet and the dance of cherubs. I am standing in a tree, on a darkened plain; the first owman is to my north, the second to my east and the tird to my west. The wheeling of Cassiopea marks the time; the shooting star punctuates the stillness; in the stillness I can hear the beat of hardened drums. I can see the pinpricks of cooking fires. And I see towards me coming the clans and families, parades and processions on horseback, carrying children and cauldrons coming to take away the last tree in the plain. Horse archers firing flaming arrows. Cannons loaded with utensils drawn by teams of fifty oxen. Infantry advances in a closing circle. The generals order their banners unfurled. All is still after the commotion. They are puzzled; they expect resistance, or if not resistance, then at least the Sakyamuni with some gesture of peaces. I offer no "pace, pace!"--and their confuzzlement will not be permanent. The moon rises in the horizon, but they are undeterred. They know the procession on the machine of the night. It is the clouds of the day they fear; it is the eagles from on high they fear. It is the gnu they fear, these feasters on human flesh. They fear not night; their astronomers have accounted for its vagaries well. But they will obey the burning tempests set down to quench them. They will pay their due tribute to the gods who must be dancing.

Consider: "Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."