The Black Book

In this dead night under a dead Greek myth I tell you finally that it is not death. It is life in her wholeness from which one draws this terrible system of love, of creation, of loss. In Cyprus under the trees, Athens, Sicily, the same long purifying tides throw up their pure lotion across statues, the robes, the eyes of the huddled philosophers who outfaced the truth. The churches are stiff with beards and candles, celebrating the dark mass of the spirit as it enters its absolute aloneness. In the cathedrals under the sea we tread the isles of weeds, and listen for the long chime of bells, bubbled under water for centuries, among the cargoes of grain and millet, raisins and fruit: argosies which are reckoned on no merchant's sheets. Cross over to Bethlehem. They will be able to tell you for certain whether something has been born from this discord of the elements, or whether the fiat has gone forth; whether this is a pre-nativity or a post-mortem!

Sitting here, on the prophetic black rock, where the Ionian comes in and touches, stealthy elastic, like a blue cat's-paw, I have seen Chamberlain lift that gun to his mouth a dozen times, always to drop it again. I have seen more than ever the modern disease looming in the world outside the sea, rock, water; the terrible disintegration of action under the hideous pressure of the ideal; the disease which made Gregory label the remaining days of life left to him, his death. The disease which... I examine my own face carefully in the mirror, finger the battered skull, consult the sunken orbits. It is not the first time in history that the gulf has opened up between the people and their makers - the artists. But the chasm has never been so vast, so uncrossable. The creator, terribly mauled and disfigured, has become the audience instead of the prime actor. He can do nothing. In the subterranean Hades of self, on the wet marsh flowering in great festering lilies and poppies, the delusions gather and hang, miasmic. The curative virtue is being turned to black bile, to poison, to corrosive. It is the Dark Ages opening again. We are going down, in a supreme Dance of Death to the terminus, among the extreme unctions of the violins. This is the going down into the tomb which Gregory experienced as a unit. "Ended. It is all ended. I realize that now, living here on the green carpet and living there in the mirror. So profound is the conviction that there is nothing I can do to reassure myself. I am a little aging man, gone bald on top, with not even a thumbed season ticket to salvation. What shall I do? I am falling apart, the delicate zygon of my brain is opened. I am rusting, my knees are rusting, the fillings in my teeth, the plate in my jaw is rusting. If I were only Roman enough to own a sword we should see some fine conclusions to this malady. Alas! Are there only dead left to bury the dead? It is the question not of the moment, but of all time. This is my eternal topic, I Gregory Stylites, destroyed by the problem of personal action."

A strange procession of symbols across the consciousness. I do not know any more what they mean. It is useless to interrogate my jailors - the mummies which line the corridor, the stiff-bearded winged gentleman who guards the bookcase. They live in the dimension of thought which is space. To speak they would have to inhabit time. Soon, I too will lose the power of time-speech. I can feel the heave bulk of barbaric words in my brain coiling up and dying for want of use^ the maggots of a large vocabulary eating each other for want of brain tissue to live on.