Leda Aldous Huxley 8

Leda Aldous Huxley 8

VIII

 

LET us abandon ourselves to Time, which is beauty’s essence. We live

among the perpetual degenerations of apotheoses. Sunset dissolves into

soft grey snow and the deep ocean of midnight, boundless as

forgetfulness or some yet undiscovered Pacific, contracts into the green

puddle of the dawn. The flowers burn to dust with their own brightness.

On the banks of ancient rivers stand the pitiful stumps of huge towers

and the ghosts of dead men straining to return into life. The woods are

full of the smell of transience. Beauty, then, is that moment of descent

when apotheosis tilts its wings downwards into the gulf. The ends of the

curve lose themselves parabolically somewhere in infinity. Our

sentimental eyes see only the middle section of this degeneration,

knowing neither the upper nor the lower extremes, which some have

thought to meet, godhead and annihilation.

 

Old Curiosity Shops! If I have said “Mortality is beauty,” it was a

weakness. The sense of time is a symptom of anæmia of the soul, through

which flows angelic ichor. We must escape from the dust of the shop.

 

Cloistered darkness and sleep offer us their lotuses. Not to perceive

where all is ugly, eaten into by the syphilis of time,

heart-sickening—this is beauty; not to desire where death is the only

consummation—wisdom.

 

Night is a measureless deep silence: daybreak brings back the fœtid

gutters of the town. O supreme beauty of a night that knows no

limitations—stars or the jagged edges of cock-crowing. Desperate, my

mind has desired it: never my blood, whose pulse is a rhythm of the

world.

 

At the other extreme, Beatrice lacks solidity, is as unresponsive to

your kisses as mathematics. She too is an oubliette, not a way of life;

an oubliette that, admittedly, shoots you upwards into light, not down

to death; but it comes to the same thing in the end.

 

What, then, is the common measure? To take the world as it is, but

metaphorically, informing the chaos of nature with a soul, qualifying

transience with eternity.

 

When flowers are thoughts, and lonely poplars fountains of aspiring

longing; when our actions are the poem of which all geographies and

architectures and every science and all the unclassed individual odds

and ends are the words, when even Helen’s white voluptuousness matches

some candour of the soul—then it will have been found, the permanent

and living loveliness.

 

It is not a far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to be smelt only

when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent; it is not a birth of

rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by state

permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an ethic,

a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, mediæval in its

implication with the very threads of life. I desire no Paphian cloister

of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating,

drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in adultery;

reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more

subtly, sometimes perhaps creating.

 

Arduous search for one who is chained by his desires to dead carcases,

whose eyes are dimmed with tears by the slow heart-breaking twilights

full of old family ghosts laid in lavender, whose despair cries out for

opiate and anodyne, craving gross sleep or a place on the airy

unsupported pinnacles which hang in the sterile upper chambers of ether.

 

Ventre à terre, head in air—your centaurs are your only poets. Their

hoofs strike sparks from the flints and they see both very near and

immensely far.

 

 

 

 

SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT

FOREWORD

 

JOHN RIDLEY, the subject of this poem, was killed in February 1918.

“If I should perish,” he wrote to me only five weeks before his death,

“if I should perish—and one isn’t exactly a ’good life’ at the

moment—I wish you’d write something about me. It isn’t vanity (for I

know you’ll do me, if anything, rather less than justice!), not vanity,

I repeat; but that queer irrational desire one has for immortality of

any kind, however short and precarious—for frankly, my dear, I doubt

whether your verses will be so very much more perennial than brass.

Still, they’ll be something. One can’t, of course, believe in any

_au-delà_ for one’s personal self; one would have first to believe in

some kind of a friendly god. And as for being a spiritualist spook, one

of those wretched beings who seem to spend their eternity in trying to

communicate with the earth by a single telephone, where the number is

always engaged, and the line chronically out of order—well, all I can

say is, Heaven preserve me from such a future life. No, my only hope is

you—and a damned poor guarantee for eternity. Don’t make of me a khaki

image, I beg. I’d rather you simply said of me, as Erasmus did of his

brother, ‘Strenuus compotor, nec scortator ignavus.’ I sincerely hope,

of course, that you won’t have to write the thing at all—hope not, but

have very little doubt you will. Good-bye.”

 

The following poem is a tentative and provisional attempt to comply with

his request. Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that

instability of mind “produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by

his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience

on the other” (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd

Instinct), that characteristic instability which makes adolescence so

feebly sceptical, so inefficient, so profoundly unhappy. I have fished

up a single day from Ridley’s forgotten existence. It has a bedraggled

air in the sunlight, this poor wisp of Lethean weed. Fortunately,

however, it will soon be allowed to drop back into the water, where we

shall all, in due course, join it. “The greater part must be content to

be as though they had not been.”

 

 

 

 

I

BETWEEN the drawing of the blind

And being aware of yet another day

There came to him behind

Close, pregnant eyelids, like a flame of blue,

Intense, untroubled by the wind,

A Mediterranean bay,

Bearing a brazen beak and foamless oars

To where, marmoreally smooth and bright,

The steps soar up in one pure flight

From the sea’s edge to the palace doors,

That have shut, have shut their valves of bronze—

And the windows too are lifeless eyes.

 

The galley grated on the stone;

He stepped out—and was alone:

No white-sailed hopes, no clouds, nor swans

To shatter the ocean’s calm, to break the sky’s.

 

Up the slow stairs:

Did he know it was a dream?

First one foot up, then the other foot,

Shuddering like a mandrake root

That hears the truffle-dog at work

And draws a breath to scream;

To moan, to scream.

The gates swing wide,

And it is coolly dark inside,

And corridors stretch out and out,

Joining the ceilings to their floors,

And parallels ring wedding bells

And through a hundred thousand doors

Perspective has abolished doubt.

 

But one of the doors was shut,

And behind it the subtlest lutanist

Was shaking a broken necklace of tinkling notes,

And somehow it was feminine music.

Strange exultant fear of desire, when hearts

Beat brokenly. He laid his hand on the latch—

And woke among his familiar books and pictures;

 

Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.

Thursday. Wasn’t he lunching at his aunt’s?

Distressing circumstance.

But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,

Which was some consolation. What a chin!

Civilized ten thousand years, and still

No better way than rasping a pale mask

With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:

Repulsive task!

And the more odious for being quotidian.

If one should live till eighty-five . . .

And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?

 

But that lute, playing across his dream . . .

Quick drops breaking the sleep of the water-wheel,

Song and ebbing whisper of a summer stream,

Music’s endless inconsequence that would reveal

To souls that listened for it, the all

Unseizable confidence, the mystic Rose,

Could it but find the magical fall

That droops, droops and dies into the perfect close . . .

And why so feminine? But one could feel

The unseen woman sitting there behind

The door, making her ceaseless slow appeal

To all that prowls and growls in the caves beneath

The libraries and parlours of the mind.

If only one were rational, if only

At least one had the illusion of being so . . .

 

Nine o’clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!

He wept to think of all those single beds,

Those desperate night-long solitudes,

Those mental Salons full of nudes.

Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.

Eight thousand nights alone—minus, perhaps,

Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.

Five little bits of heaven

(Tum-de-rum, de-rum, de-rum),

Five little bits of Heaven and one that was a lapse,

High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly

In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the

(Like infants’ impoliteness, a terrible infant’s brightness),

And he would shut his eyes so as not to see

His own hot blushes calling him a swine.