Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Of the sun-like stage. And all the space between,
Like the hot fringes of a summer sky,
Is quick with trumpets, beats with the pulse of drums,
Athwart whose sultry thunders rise and fall
Flute fountains and the swallow flight of strings.
Music, the revelation and marvellous lie!
On the bright trestles tumblers, tamer of beasts,
Dancers and clowns affirm their fury of life.
“The World-Renowned Van Hogen Mogen in
The Master Mystery of Modern Times”.
He talks, he talks; more powerfully than even
Music his quick words hammer on men’s minds.
“Observe this hat, ladies and gentlemen;
Empty, observe, empty as the universe
Before the Head for which this Hat is made
Was or could think. Empty, observe, observe.”
The rabbit kicks; a bunch of paper flowers
Blooms in the limelight; paper tape unrolls,
Endless, a clue. “Ladies and gentlemen...”
Sharp, sharp on malleable minds his words
Hammer. The little Indian boy
Enters the basket. Bright, an Ethiop’s sword
Transfixes it and bleeding is withdrawn.
Death draws and petrifies the watching faces.
“Ladies and gentlemen”: the great Van Hogen Mogen
Smiles and is kind. A puddle of dark blood
Slowly expands. “The irremediable
Has been and is no more.”
Empty of all but blood, the basket gapes.
“Arise!” he calls, and blows his horn. “Arise!”
And bird-like from the highest gallery
The little Indian answers.
Shout upon shout, the hanging gardens reverberate.
Happy because the irremediable is healed,
Happy because they have seen the impossible,
Because they are freed from the dull daily law,
They shout, they shout. And great Van Hogen Mogen
Modestly bows, graciously smiles. The band
Confirms the lie with cymbals and bassoons,
The curtain falls. How quickly the walls recede,
How soon the petrified gargoyles re-become
Women and men! who fill the warm thick air
With rumour of their loves and discontents,
Not suffering even great Hogen Mogen —
Only begetter out of empty hats
Of rose and rabbit, raiser from the dead
To invade the sanctity of private life.
The Six Aerial Sisters Polpetini
Dive dangerously from trapeze to far
Trapeze, like stars, and know not how to fall.
For if they did and if, of his silver balls,
Sclopis, the juggler, dropped but one - but one
Of all the flying atoms which he builds
With his quick throwing into a solid arch
What panic then would shake the pale flower faces
Blooming so tranquilly in their hanging beds!
What a cold blast of fear! But patrons must not,
And since they must not, cannot be alarmed.
Hence Sclopis, hence (the proof is manifest)
The Six Aerial Ones infallibly
Function, and have done, and for ever will.
Professor Chubb’s Automaton performs
Upon the viols and virginals, plays chess,
Ombre and loo, mistigri, tric-trac, pushpin,
Sings Lilliburlero in falsetto, answers
All questions put to it, and with its rubber feet
Noiselessly dances the antique heydiguy.
“Is it a man?” the terrible infant wonders.
And “no”, they say, whose business it is
To say such infants nay. And “no” again
They shout when, after watching Dobbs and Debs
Step simultaneously through intricate dances,
Hammer the same tune with their rattling clogs
In faultless unison, the infant asks,
“And they, are they machines?”
Music, the revelation and marvellous lie,
Rebuilds in the minds of all a suave and curving
Kingdom of Heaven, where the saxophone
Affirms everlasting loves, the drums deny
Death, and where great Tenorio, when he sings,
Makes Picardy bloom only with perfumed roses,
And never a rotting corpse in all its earth.
Play, music, play! In God’s bright limelight eyes
An angel walks and with one rolling glance
Blesses each hungry flower in the hanging gardens.
“Divine,” they cry, having no words by which
To call the nameless spade a spade, “Divine
Zenocrate!” There are dark mysteries
Whose name is beauty, strange revelations called
Love, and a gulph of pleasure and of awe
Where words fall vain and wingless in the dark;
The seen Ineffable, the felt but all-Unknown
And Undescribed, is God. “Divine, divine!”
The god-intoxicated shout goes up.
“Divine Zenocrate!”
“Father,” the terrible infant’s voice is shrill,
“Say, father, why does the lady wear no skirts?”
She wears no skirts; God’s eyes have never been brighter.
The face flowers open in her emanation.
She is suave and curving Kingdom of Heaven
Made visible, and in her sugared song
The ear finds paradise. Divine, divine!
Her belly is like a mound of wheat, her breasts
Are towers, her hair like a flock of goats.
Her foot is feat with diamond toes
And she - divine Zenocrate And she on legs of ruby goes.
The face flowers tremble in the rushing wind
Of her loud singing. A poet in the pit
Jots down in tears the words of her Siren song.
So every spirit as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the rarer body doth procure
To habit in, and is more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight:
For of the soul the body form doth take;
And soul is form and doth the body make.
“Now, boys, together. All with me,” she cries
Through the long sweet suspense of dominant chords;
“For of the soul,” her voice is paradise,
“For of the soul the body form doth take;
And soul is form and doth the body make.”
Zenocrate, alone, alone divine!
God save the King. Music’s last practical joke
Still bugling in their ears of war and glory,
The folk emerge into the night.
Already next week’s bills are being posted:
Urim and Thummim, cross-talk comedians;
Ringpok, the Magian of Tibet;
The Two Bedelias; Ruby and Truby Dix;
Sam Foy and Troupe of Serio-Comic Cyclists...
Theatre of immemorial varieties,
Old mummery, but mummers never the same!
Twice nightly every night from now till doomsday
The hanging gardens, bedded with pale flower faces,
Young flowers in the old old gardens, will echo
With ever new, with ever new delight.
A HIGHWAY ROBBERY
It is a scene of murder - elegant, is it not?
You lutanists, who play to naked Queens,
As summer sleep or music under trees,
As luncheon on the grass - the grass on which
The country copulatives make sport, the pale
Grass with the tall tubed hats, the inky coats
And rosy, rosy among the funeral black
(Memento Vivere) a naked girl.
/> But here the sleepers bleed, the tumbling couples
Struggle, but not in love; the naked girl
Kneels at the feet of one who hesitates,
Voluptuously, between a rape and a murder.
Bandits angelical and you, rich corpses!
Truth is your sister, Goodness your spouse.
Towering skies lean down and tall, tall trees
Impose their pale arsenical benediction,
Making all seem exquisitely remote
And small and silent, like a village fair
Seen from the hill-top, far far below.
And yet they walk on the village green to whom
The fair is huge, tumultuous, formidable. Earth
Lies unremembered beneath the feet of dancers
Who, looking up, see not the sky, but towers
And bright invading domes and the fierce swings,
Scythe-like, reaping and ravaging the quiet.
And when night falls, the shuddering gas-flares scoop
Out of the topless dark a little vault
Of smoky gold, wherein the dancers still
Jig away, gods of a home-made universe.
CALIGULA OR THE TRIUMPH OF BEAUTY
Prow after prow, the floating ships
Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid;
And Caesar on a piebald horse
Prances with all his cavalcade.
Drunk with their own quick blood they go.
The waves flash as with seeing eyes;
The tumbling cliff’s mimic their speed,
And they have filled the vacant skies
With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set
Aeolus roaring with their shout,
Made Vesta’s temple on the cape
Spin like a circus roundabout.
The twined caduceus in his hand,
And having golden wings for spurs,
Young Caesar dressed as God looks on
And cheers his jolly mariners;
Cheers as they heave from off the bridge
The trippers from the seaside town;
Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads
And shove them bubbling down to drown.
There sweeps a spiral curve of gesture
From the allegoric sky;
Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs
Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,
Slides down the flank of Mars and takes
From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,
Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops
Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.
A burgess tumbles from the bridge
Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips
From Caesar through the plunging legs
To the blue sea between the ships.
NERO AND SPORUS OR THE TRIUMPH OF ART
The Christians by whose muddy light
Dimly, dimly I divine
Your eyes and see your pallid beauty
Like a pale night-primrose shine,
Colourless in the dark, revere
A God who slowly died that they
Might suffer the less, who bore the pain
Of all time in a single day,
The pain of all men in a single
Wounded body and sad heart.
The yellow marble, smooth as water,
Builds me a Golden House: and there
The marble Gods sleep in their strength
And the white Parian girls are fair.
Roses and waxen oleanders,
Green grape bunches and the flushed peach
All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,
Knowing, loving, becoming each.
The ship went down, my mother swam:
I wedded and myself was wed:
Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:
Old Seneca too slowly bled.
The wild beast and the victim both,
The ravisher and the wincing bride,
King of the world and a slave’s slave,
Terror-haunted, deified —
All these, sweet Sporus, I, an artist,
Am and, an artist, needs must be.
Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.
And you have heard my symphony
Of wailing voices and clashed brass,
With long shrill flutings that suspend
Pain o’er a muttering gulph of terrors,
And piercing blasts of joy that end,
Gods, in what discord! — could I have
So hymned the Furies, were the bane
Still sap within the hemlock stalk,
The red swords virgin-bright again?
Or take a child’s love that is all
Worship, all tenderness and trust,
A dawn-web, dewy and fragile - take
And with the violence of lust
Tear and defile it. You shall hear
The breaking dumbness and the thin
Harsh crying that is the very music
Of shame and the remorse of sin.
Christ died; the artist lives for all;
Loves, and his naked marbles stand
Pure as a column on the sky,
Whose lips, whose breasts, whose thighs demand
Not our humiliation, not
The shuddering of an after-shame;
And of his agonies men know
Only the beauty born of them.
Christ died, but living Nero turns
Your mute remorse to song; he gives
To idiot Fate eyes like a lover’s,
And while his music plays, God lives.
NERO AND SPORUS
II
Dark stirrings in the perfumed air
Touch your cheeks, lift your hair.
With softer fingers I caress,
Sporus, all your loveliness.
Round as a fruit, tree-tangled shines
The moon; and fire-flies in the vines,
Like stars in a delirious sky,
Gleam and go out. Unceasingly
The fountains fall, the nightingales
Sing. But time flows and love avails
Nothing. The Christians smoulder red;
Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead;
And you, sweet Sporus, you and I
We too must die, we too must die.
MYTHOLOGICAL INCIDENT
Through the pale skeleton of woods
Orion walks. The North Wind lays
Its cold lips to the twin steel flutes
That are his gun, and plays.
Knee-deep he goes, where penny-wiser
Than all his kind who steal and hoard,
Year after year some sylvan miser
His copper wealth has stored.
The Queen of Love and Beauty lays
In neighbouring beechen aisles her baits
Bread-crumbs and the golden maize.
Patiently she waits.
And when the unwary pheasant comes
To fill his painted maw with crumbs,
Accurately the sporting Queen
Takes aim. The bird has been.
Secure, Orion walks her way.
The Cyprian loads, presents, makes fire.
He falls. ’Tis Venus all entire
Attached to her recumbent prey.
FEMMES DAMNÉES
(from the French of Charles Baudelaire)
The lamps had languisht and their light was pale;
On cushions deep Hippolyta reclined.
Those potent kisses that had torn the veil
From her young candour filled her dreaming mind.
With tempest-troubled eyes she sought the blue
Heaven of her innocence, how far away!
Like some sad traveller, who turns to view
The dim horizons passed at dawn of day.
Tears and the muffled light of weary eyes,
The stupor and the dull voluptuous trance,
Limp arms, like weapons dropped by on
e who flies
All served her fragile beauty to enhance.
Calm at her feet and joyful, Delphine lay
And gazed at her with ardent eyes and bright,
Like some strong beast that, having mauled its prey,
Draws back to mark the imprint of its bite.
Strong and yet bowed, superbly on her knees,
She snuffed her triumph, on that frailer grace
Poring voluptuously, as though to seize
The signs of thanks upon the other’s face.
Gazing, she sought in her pale victim’s eye
The speechless canticle that pleasure sings,
The infinite gratitude that, like a sigh,
Mounts slowly from the spirit’s deepest springs.
“Now, now you understand (for love like ours
Is proof enough) that ‘twere a sin to throw
The sacred holocaust of your first flowers
To those whose breath might parch them as they blow.
“Light falls my kiss, as the ephemeral wing
That scarcely stirs the shining of a lake.
What ruinous pain your lover’s kiss would bring!
A plough that leaves a furrow in its wake.
“Over you, like a herd of ponderous kine,
Man’s love will pass and his caresses fall
Like trampling hooves. Then turn your face to mine;
Turn, oh my heart, my half of me, my all!
“Turn, turn, that I may see their starry lights,
Your eyes of azure; turn. For one dear glance
I will reveal love’s most obscure delights,
And you shall drowse in pleasure’s endless trance.”
“Not thankless, nor repentant in the least
Is your Hippolyta.” She raised her head.
“But one who from some grim nocturnal feast
Returns at dawn feels less disquieted.
“I bear a weight of terrors, and dark hosts
Of phantoms haunt my steps and seem to lead.
I walk, compelled, behind these beckoning ghosts
Down sliding roads and under skies that bleed.
“Is ours so strange an act, so full of shame?
Explain the terrors that disturb my bliss.
When you say, Love, I tremble at the name;
And yet my mouth is thirsty for your kiss.
“Ah, look not so, dear sister, look not so!
You whom I love, even though that love should be
A snare for my undoing, even though
Loving I am lost for all eternity.”
Delphine looked up, and fate was in her eye.
From the god’s tripod and beneath his spell,
Shaking her tragic locks, she made reply:
“Who in love’s presence dares to speak of hell?