The Glass Bead Game (59 page)

For here all knowledge stood at my command.

There was provision here for every need:

A title full of promise on each book

Responded to my every rapid look.

Here there was fruit to satisfy the greed

Of any student's timid aspirations,

Of any master's bold investigations.

Here was the inner meaning, here the key,

To poetry, to wisdom, and to science.

Magic and erudition in alliance

Opened the door to every mystery.

These books provided pledges of all power

To him who came here at this magic hour.

A lectern stood near by; with hands that shook

I placed upon it one enticing book,

Deciphered at a glance the picture writing,

As in a dream we find ourselves reciting

A poem or lesson we have never learned.

At once I soared aloft to starry spaces

Of the soul, and with the zodiac turned,

Where all the revelations of all races,

Whatever intuition has divined,

Millennial experience of all nations,

Harmoniously met in new relations,

Old insights with new symbols recombined,

So that in minutes or in hours as I read

I traced once more the whole path of mankind,

And all that men have ever done and said

Disclosed its inner meaning to my mind.

I read, and saw those hieroglyphic forms

Couple and part, and coalesce in swarms,

Dance for a while together, separate,

Once more in newer patterns integrate,

A kaleidoscope of endless metaphors—

And each some vaster, fresher sense explores

Bedazzled by these sights, I looked away

From the book to give my eyes a moment's rest,

And saw that I was not the only guest.

An old man stood before that grand array

Of tomes. Perhaps he was the archivist.

I saw that he was earnestly intent

Upon some task, and I could not resist

A strange conviction that I had to know

The manner of his work, and what it meant.

I watched the old man, with frail hand and slow,

Remove a volume and inspect what stood

Written upon its back, then saw him blow

With pallid lips upon the title—could

A title possibly be more alluring

Or offer greater promise of enduring

Delight? But now his finger wiped across

The spine. I saw it silently erase

The name, and watched with fearful sense of loss

As he inscribed another in its place

And then moved on to smilingly efface

One more, but only a newer title to emboss.

For a long while I looked at him bemused,

Then turned, since reason totally refused

To understand the meaning of his actions,

Back to my book—I'd seen but a few lines—

And found I could no longer read the signs

Or even see the rows of images.

The world of symbols I had barely entered

That had stirred me to such transports of bliss,

In which a universe of meaning centered,

Seemed to dissolve and rush away, careen

And reel and shake in feverish contractions,

And fade out, leaving nothing to be seen

But empty parchment with a hoary sheen.

I felt a hand upon me, felt it slide

Over my shoulder. The old man stood beside

My lectern, and I shuddered while

He took my book and with a subtle smile

Brushed his finger lightly to elide

The former title, then began to write

New promises and problems, novel inquiries,

New formulas for ancient mysteries.

Without a word, he plied his magic style.

Then, with my book, he disappeared from sight.

 

Worship

In the beginning was the rule of sacred kings

Who hallowed field, grain, plow, who handed down

The law of sacrifices, set the bounds

To mortal men forever hungering

For the Invisible Ones' just ordinance

That holds the sun and moon in perfect balance

And whose forms in their eternal radiance

Feel no suffering, nor know death's ambience.

Long ago the sons of the gods, the sacred line,

Passed, and mankind remained alone,

Embroiled in pleasure and pain, cut off from being,

Condemned to change unhallowed, unconfined.

But intimations of the true life never died,

And it is for us, in this time of harm

To keep, in metaphor and symbol and in psalm,

Reminders of that former sacred reverence.

Perhaps some day the darkness will be banned,

Perhaps some day the times will turn about,

The sun will once more rule us as our god

And take the sacrifices from our hands.

 

Soap Bubbles

From years of study and of contemplation

An old man brews a work of clarity,

A gay and involuted dissertation

Discoursing on sweet wisdom playfully.

An eager student bent on storming heights

Has delved in archives and in libraries,

But adds the touch of genius when he writes

A first book full of deepest subtleties.

A boy, with bowl and straw, sits and blows,

Filling with breath the bubbles from the bowl.

Each praises like a hymn, and each one glows;

Into the filmy beads he blows his soul.

Old man, student, boy, all these three

Out of the Maya-foam of the universe

Create illusions. None is better or worse.

But in each of them the Light of Eternity

Sees its reflection, and burns more joyfully.

 

After Dipping Into the
Summa Contra Gentiles

To truth, it seems to us, life once was nearer,

The world ordered, intelligences clearer,

Wisdom and knowledge were not yet divided.

They lived far more serenely, many-sided,

Those ancients of whom Plato, the Chinese,

Relate their incandescent verities.

Whenever we entered the temple of Aquinas,

The graceful
Summa contra Gentiles,

A new world greeted us, sweet, mature,

A world of truth clarified and pure.

There all seemed lucid, Nature charged with Mind,

Man moving from God to Him, as He designed.

The Law, in one great formulary bound,

Forming a whole, a still unbroken round.

But we who belong to his posterity

Seem condemned to doubt and irony,

To journeys in the wilderness, to strife,

Obsessions, and longings for a better life.

But if our children's children undergo

Such sufferings as ours, they will bestow

Praise upon us as blessed and as wise.

We will appear transfigured in their eyes,

For out of our lives' harsh cacophonies

They will hear only fading harmonies,

The legends of an anguish often told,

The echoes of contentions long grown cold.

And those of us who trust ourselves the least,

Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,

Will make their mark upon eternity,

And youth will turn to them as to a feast.

The time may come when a man who confessed

His self-doubts will be ranked among the blessed

Who never suffered anguish or knew fear,

Whose times were times of glory and good cheer,

Who lived like children, simple happy lives.

For in us too is part of that Eternal Mind

Which through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind:

Both you and I will pass, but it survives.

 

Stages

As every flower fades and as all youth

Departs, so life at every stage,

So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,

Blooms in its day and may not last forever.

Since life may summon us at every age

Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,

Be ready bravely and without remorse

To find new light that old ties cannot give.

In all beginnings dwells a magic force

For guarding us and helping us to live.

Serenely let us move to distant places

And let no sentiments of home detain us.

The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us

But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.

If we accept a home of our own making,

Familiar habit makes for indolence.

We must prepare for parting and leave-taking

Or else remain the slaves of permanence.

Even the hour of our death may send

Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,

And life may summon us to newer races.

So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

 

The Glass Bead Game

We re-enact with reverent attention

The universal chord, the masters' harmony,

Evoking in unsullied communion

Minds and times of highest sanctity.

We draw upon the iconography

Whose mystery is able to contain

The boundlessness, the storm of all existence,

Give chaos form, and hold our lives in rein.

The pattern sings like crystal constellations,

And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole,

And cannot be dislodged or misdirected,

Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.

THE THREE LIVES

ONE

The Rainmaker

It was many thousands of years ago, when women ruled. In tribe and family, mothers and grandmothers were revered and obeyed. Much more was made of the birth of a girl than of a boy.

There was an ancestress in the village, a hundred or more years ago, whom everyone revered and feared as if she were a queen, although in the memory of man she had seldom lifted a finger or spoken a word. Many a day she sat by the entrance to her hut, a retinue of ministering kinsfolk around her, and the women of the village came to pay their respects, to tell her their affairs, to show her their children and ask her blessing on them. The pregnant women came to ask her to touch their bellies and name the expected child. Sometimes the tribal mother would give the touch, sometimes she only nodded or shook her head, or else remained motionless. She rarely said anything; she was merely there, sitting and ruling, sitting with her yellowish-white hair falling in thin strands around her leathery, farsighted eagle's face, sitting and receiving veneration, presents, requests, news, reports, accusations, sitting and known to all as the mother of seven daughters, and the grandmother and ancestor of many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, sitting and holding in those wrinkled features and back of that brown forehead the wisdom, the tradition, the law, the morality, and the honor of the village.

It was a spring evening, overcast, the darkness falling early. The ancient herself was not sitting in front of the mud hut. In her stead was her daughter, almost as white-haired and stately and not much younger. She sat and rested. Her seat was the threshold, a flat field stone, covered with a skin in cold weather. At a little distance from her a few children, women, and boys squatted in a semicircle in the sand or grass. They squatted here every evening that it was not raining or too cold, for they wanted to hear the ancient's daughter tell stories or sing spells. Formerly, the ancient herself had done this, but now that she was too old and no longer communicative, her daughter took her place. Just as she had learned all the stories and spells from the old woman, so she also had her voice, her figure, the quiet dignity of her bearing, her movements, and her language. The younger listeners knew her much better than her mother and by now scarcely realized that she sat here in another's place passing on the tales and wisdom of the tribe. The wellspring of knowledge flowed from her lips on these evenings. She preserved the tribe's treasure under her white hair. Behind her gently furrowed old brow dwelt the memory and the mind of the village. Anyone who knew any spells or stories had learned them from her. Aside from her and the ancient, there was only one other guardian of knowledge in the tribe, but he remained hidden most of the time: a mysterious and extremely silent man: the Rainmaker, or as he was also called, the Weathermaker.

Crouching among the listeners was also the boy Knecht, and beside him a little girl named Ada. He was fond of this girl, often played with her and protected her, not out of love, for he knew nothing of that as yet, was still too much a child, but because she was the Rainmaker's daughter. Knecht adored the Rainmaker; next to the ancient and her daughter he admired no one so strongly as the Rainmaker. But the others were women. You could venerate and fear them, but you could not conceive the thought, could not possibly cherish the wish to become what they were. The Rainmaker was a rather unapproachable man; it was not easy for a boy to stay near him. That had to be managed in roundabout ways, and one of these roundabout ways to the Rainmaker was Knecht's concern for his child. As often as possible he went to the Rainmaker's somewhat isolated hut to fetch her. Then he would sit with her listening to the old woman's tales, and later take her home. He had done this today, and now he was squatting beside her in the dark group, listening.

Today the old woman was telling about the Witches' Village:

“Sometimes there is a wicked woman in a village who wishes harm to everyone. Usually these women conceive no children. Sometimes one of these women is so wicked that the village will no longer let her stay. Then the villagers go to her hut at night, her husband is fettered, and the woman is beaten with switches and driven far out into the woods and swamps. She is cursed with a curse and left there. Soon the husband's fetters are removed and if he is not too old, he can take himself another wife. But if the expelled woman does not die, she wanders about in the woods and swamps, learns the language of animals, and when she has roamed long enough, sooner or later she finds her way to a small village that is called the Witches' Village. There all the wicked women who have been driven from their villages have come together and made a village of their own. There they live, do their wickedness, and make magic. But especially, because they have no children of their own, they like to coax children from the proper villages, and when a child is lost in the woods and never seen again, it may not have drowned in the swamp or been eaten by a wolf, but led astray by a witch and taken to the Witches' Village. In the days when I was still little and my grandmother was the eldest in the village, a girl once went to pick bilberries with the others, and while she was picking she grew tired and fell asleep. She was small, the ferns hid her from sight, and the other children moved on and did not notice until they were back in the village and it was already evening. Then they saw that the girl was no longer with them. The young men were sent out; they searched and called in the woods until night fell, and then they came back and had not found her. But the little girl, after she had slept enough, went on and on in the woods. And the more frightened she became, the faster she ran, but she no longer had any idea where she was and only ran farther away from the village, deeper and deeper into wild country. Around her neck, on a strip of bast, she wore a boar's tooth that her father had given her. He had brought it back from the hunt, and with a stone tool bored a hole through the tooth so that the bast could be drawn through it, and before that he had boiled the tooth three times in boar's blood and sung good spells, and anyone who wore such a tooth was protected against many kinds of magic. Now a woman appeared from among the trees. She was a witch. She put on a kindly face and said: ‘Greetings, pretty child, have you lost your way? Come along with me, I'll take you home.' The child went along. But she remembered what her mother and father had told her, that she should never let a stranger see the boar's tooth, and so while she walked she slipped the tooth off the strip of bast and tucked it into her belt without being noticed. The woman walked for hours with the girl; it was already night when they reached the village, but it was not our village, it was the Witches' Village. There the girl was locked up in a dark stable, but the witch went to sleep in her hut. In the morning the witch said: ‘Don't you have a boar's tooth with you?' The child said no, she had had one, but she had lost it in the woods, and she showed her necklace with the tooth missing from it. Then the witch took a clay pot filled with earth, and three plants were growing in the earth. The child looked at the plants and asked what they were. The witch pointed to the first plant and said: ‘That is your mother's life.' Then she pointed to the second and said: ‘That is your father's life.' Then she pointed to the third plant: ‘And that is your own life. As long as the plants are green and growing, you are all alive and well. If one withers, then the one whose life it is falls sick. If one is pulled out, as I am going to pull one out now, then the one whose life it is will surely die.' She took hold of the plant that meant the father's life and began tugging at it, and when she had pulled it out a little so that a piece of the white root could be seen, the plant gave a deep sigh.…”