Poetry

Judgement 32

“And what about the year there were reports

Accusing you and him of treachery

By working for the French at our ports

Talking of what the police called ‘Spy-Nosey’

When you were young? You nature loving poets

Were pantheists. In his Biographia

Coleridge says you courted mystic power

Finding God in the land and in Spinoza.”

And Wordsworth said: “When both of us were young

The mystic and unnameable and dark

Was such a fascinating special thing

We made up a religion for its sake

And putting common people into song

We hated to make use of any book

Or prior tradition teaching any rule

Choosing to learn from mountain and from vale.

“As if I would be Jesus, rather than

Obeying him; by letting Being speak

Unmediated to the heart alone

Without the intercession of a book.

I learned God is a person later on.”

“How did you change?” I asked him. In the dark,

Not far away, in the quiet, the dead body

Appeared to move and shake, but anyway

He answered me: “The beauty of the land

Or the created world speaks in its quiet.

I do not know how. I was disciplined

To silent prayer. The silent prayer is that

Technique of reverie never explained

In any book. But I learned you will sit

And meditate, completely disengaged

All blind and dumb, as if it were a pledge

“Of being dead, with intimations of

The mind of nature. That’s the silent prayer.

Half way between the living death and life.

That prayer to nature had a fatal flaw.

The more you disengage and you deprive

Your self of personality, the more

A greater person seems to speak to you.

I went back to the church. So, that is how.

“For, Jesus clearly showed the way to pray,

In silence, non-engagement, in the desert,

In secret, thus he taught the silent way.

But more than this, he communed with his parent,

He made petitions often verbally.

But what goes on with God and man is private.

The silent prayer is one thing, and the talk

Is yet another valid good technique.

Because we are heard if we make supplication

And we need to be saved.” He finished there.

While he was talking I had the impression

Something was going on at the centre

Where Jesus, following the crucifixion

Was lying, dead. And in the poet’s stare

I saw him think the same. But we went on

Discussing things. My boy spoke, like this, then:

“A saving power, outside the world, was waiting

To help the world and disengage it from

History. Hovering and hesitating,

The saving power had to be asked to come.

The high romantics of victorious England

Knew something wasn’t right. But what problem

Had brought about the feeling in the gut

A physically felt feeling of hurt

“That everything was going badly wrong?

Was it the triumph of technology

The great endeavour of the Abendland

The know how of subjective mastery

And the objective skillfulness which brung

The global reach of British industry

And sciences which flowered in dirt and grace

And turned the English to a master race

“And made them godless to the same extent?

They were dominated by the reasoning mind

And fascinated with their achievement

Where everything seemed to be made of sand,

Spreading a wasteland everywhere they went

And finally so lost, with no homeland.

What was it? The attachment to the world

Alienation from talking with God.

“For in the end, this science renders us

Engaged in world, committed just to it,

As pieces in technology’s networks,

So men conceived themselves like a robot

Where silence was mere absence of a noise.

Look at the English land, just look at it,

So ruined, by technology, for sure.

There’s no escape, it’s in us, our killer.

“Technology is a thousand years of age

Bred in, distracting, consuming us all.

To ruin Being, consume God with rage.

The language that we used was its chief tool,”

He spoke, and I said: “This special knowledge

Is new to me. Are we under the spell

Of such technology?” “Let me explain,

In haste. About the other origin.

“Before the world begins again once more,”

He said, without delaying in his speech:

“The talking and the silent types of prayer

And public liturgy inside the church,

These are in brief the global saving power.

But they were absent in the final age,

When base technology dehumanised

First in the soul, the mind, then it erased

The world. ‘Only a god can save us now’

Is what we started saying in the end.

You saw the ruin as you came this way,

Almost the entire race refused to stand

And come here, for the other and new day.”

He turned and looked toward the table round,

To where the body of my guide had been:

The place was empty, no one there, no one.

At once music, an old familiar tune

As if sung for the first time: “Christ is risen

From the dead!”, in a sweet diapason

The joy that they expressed was just amazing

And straightway like the rising of the sun

Or like a dawn in that sweet orison

A shock of light burst from the empty tomb,

And a bell pealed like the last crack of doom.