the whole universe expands and contracts, beats like a great heart ...
diastole and systole
peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back and forth, die
and live, burn and be damned,
the great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
and we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the
beauty. we see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God
making commandments: this the God who does not
care and will never cease. look at the seas there
flasing against this rock in the darkness--look at the
tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and
dawn
but why would life maintain itself,
being nothing but a dirty scum on the sea
dropped from foul air? could it perhaps perceive
glories to come? could it foresee that cellular life
would make the mountain forest and the eagle dawning,
monstrously beautiful, wings, eyes and claws, dawning
over the rock ridge? and the passionate human intelligence
straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the
unvierse to the last galaxy--
having made of many
one cell
they invented chlorophyll and ate sunlight, cradled in peace
on the warm waves; but certain assassins among them
discovered that it was easier to eat flesh
than feed on lean air and sunlight; thence the animals
greedy mouthes and guts, life robbing life,
grew from the plants; and as the ocean ebbed and
flowed many plants and animals
were stranded in the treat marshes along the shore,
where many died and some lived
from these grew all land-life
plants, beasts and men; the mountain forest and the mind of Aeschylus
and the mouse in the wall
what is this thing called life? ---but i believe
that the earth and stars too, and the whole glittering
universe, and rocks on the mountain have life,
only we do not call it so--i speak of the life
that oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo
hydrates to live, and from that chemical energy
makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred
and terror: how do these things grow
from a chemical reaction?
i think they were here al-
ready. i think the rocks
and the earth and the other planets, stars and
galaxies have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
but the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-
glass
to concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
it seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
from which it came. so we scream and laugh, clamorous
animals
born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the door-
yard
prefer silence: but those and all things have their own
awareness,
as the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and in-
fluence each other, each unto all,
like the cells of a man's body making one being,
they make one being, one consciousness, one life, one
God
