I can think of no lovelier day than this in the full bloom of the twentieth century, with the sun rotting away and a man on a little sledge blowing the Song of Love through his piccolo. This day shines in my heart with such a ghastly brilliance that even if I were the saddest man in the world I should not want to leave the earth.
What a magnificent evacuation, this last flight heavenward from the holy citadel! Looking downward the earth seems soft and lovely again. The earth denuded of man. Unspeakably soft and lovely, this earth bereft of man. Rid of God-hunters, rid of her whoring progeny, the mother of all living wheels her way again with grace and dignity. The earth knows no God, no charity, no love. The earth is a womb which creates and destroys. And man is not of the earth, but of God. To God then let him go, naked, broken, corrupt, divided, lonelier than the deepest gulch.
Today yet a little while Progress and Invention keep me company as I march toward the mountain top. Tomorrow every world city will fall. Tomorrow every civilized being on earth will die of poison and steel.
But today you can still bathe me in God’s wonderful love lyrics. Today it is still chamber music, dream, hallucination. The last five minutes! A dream, a fugue without a coda. Every note rotting away like dead meat on the hooks. A gangrene in which the melody is drowned by its own suppurating stench. Once the organism feels death within its grasp it shudders with rapture. A quickening which mounts to triumphant agony-the agony of the death rattle, when food and sex are one. The whirlpool! and everything that is sucked into it going down with it! The wild, unknowing savage who began at the circumference in pursuit of his tail drawing in closer and closer in great labyrinthine spirals and now reaching the dead center where he whirls on the pivot of self with an incandescence that sends a blinding flood of light through every gutter of the soul: spinning there insane and insatiate, the ghoul and gouger of his soul, spinning in centrifugal lust and fury until he sputters out through the hole in the center of him; going down like a gas bag-vault, cellar, ribs, skin, blood, tissue, mind, and heart all consumed, devoured, blottoed in final annihilation.
This is the city, and this the music. Out of the little black boxes an unending river of romance in which the crocodiles weep. All walking toward the mountain top. All in step. From the power house above God floods the street with music. It is God who turns the music on every evening just as we quit work. To some of us is given a crust of bread, to others a Rolls Royce. All moving toward the Exits, the stale bread locked in the garbage cans. What is it that keeps our feet in unison as we move toward the shining mountain top? It is the Song of Love which was heard in the manger by the three wise men from the East. A man without legs, his eyes blown out, was playing it on the piccolo as he rolled through the street of the holy city on his littlc sledge. It is this Song of Love which now pours out of millions of little black boxes at the precise chronological moment, so that even our little brown brothers in the Philippines can hear it. It is this beautiful Song of Love which gives us the strength to build the tallest buildings, to launch the biggest battleships, to span the widest rivers. It is this Song which gives us the courage to kill millions of men at once by just pressing a button. This Song which gives us the energy to plunder the earth and lay everything bare.
Walking toward the mountain top I study the rigid outlines of your buildings which tomorrow will crumple and collapse in smoke. I study your peace programs which will end in a hail of bullets. I study your glittering shop windows crammed with inventions for which tomorrow there will be no use. I study your worn faces hacked with toil, your broken arches, your fallen stomachs. I study you individually and in the swarm-and how you stink, all of you! You stink like God and his all-merciful love and wisdom. God the maneater! God the shark swimming with his parasites!
It is God, let us not forget, who turns the radio on each evening. It is God who floods our eyes with shining, brimming light. Soon we will be with Him, folded in his bosom, gathered up in bliss and eternity, even with the Word, equal before the Law. This is coming about through love, a love so great that beside it the mightiest dynamo is but a mosquito buzzing.
And now I take leave of you and your holy citadel. I go now to sit on the mountain top, to wait another ten thousand years while you struggle up toward the light. I wish, just for this evening, that you would dim the lights, that you would muffle the loudspeakers. This evening I would like to meditate a bit in peace and quiet. I would like to forget for a little while that you are swarming around in your five-and-tencent honeycomb.
Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with youMYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.
Louveciennes;-Clich y;—Villa Seurat.
1934-1935.
The End
