The Veil: A Poem

The Veil

Part 1: The Creation and Fall of Man

An Argument

1.

“As we remain involved

In the moment of our life

Our imagined world retains its order

But as we pause in deep reflection

Our personal tragedy

Becomes apparent to us

Our eminent death

Is realized in our mind

The fatal arguments involve us

The largeness of time overwhelms us

The hopes and the efforts of our life

Our love and our thought

Appear to us as meaningless

How is it that we are captured

In our own reflection?

Why do we not keep ourselves

From these thoughtful indulgences?”

So speaks the active impulse

To his emotive counterpart

His thoughts are allied with passivity

They stupefy him with a pitiful motive

Active animals scoff at him

As he sits in stunned dejection

A Myth

1.

The parents regard the anomaly

In horror—they can’t conceive the infant rage

The newly bodied sprite

Shrieks fantastic infant misery

Cascading cries rain pathetic

In the mind of the father

Looking on astonished and in love

The man beholds his own image

He sees his projected innocence

Sprawling before him

Wailing with original fervor

2.

The toddler realizes his diabolical self hood

Little meticulous fingers wreak mischief in the household

He is the envoy of chaos

Cacophony follows his footfalls

Perplexed the parents rush to restrict the toddler

They command “No!”

The word resounds throughout creation

Never before in nature

Was such behavior displayed

Never before has a species

Cultivated its offspring

By restriction

3.

At the time of the fall

I was a child

Language was formatting within me

Onamantopaya rubbing new reasons

The bare rubble of language

Chewed and crumbled in the mind

Separating the rough jewels of thought

Polishing them to verbal acuity

Combining and thrusting them forward

On coherent strings

When my mother called me

By my name

I was called fatally to attend

(My name was my prized possession

My lone responsibility)

She cultured me toward her ideal

Formulating me in her mind

Fire on clay

The veil hardening quick

Thrust downward

Splicing the awareness into light and dark

Cropping the personality

Two separate forms newly born

Now occupy the landscape

The shadow falls away

Limping into the darkened background

Snickering his revenge

He will wait and lurk

And he will leap up

From the body

Shattering the veil

Assuming his reasonable throne

Behind the veil

Is where the shadow waits

Where is he who will rend the veil?

Where is he

Who violates the Holy of Holies?

(And at that moment

The veil of the temple

Was torn in two from top to bottom)

Surely this man is the Son of God

4.

Every garment

Is a vestige

Of that veil

Garments express vanity

Illusory presentation

Hidden truth

Garments are devised

To cover cultivated shame

A naked toddler on a beach

Runs with his masculinity

Projected to the horizon

He cannot contain himself

The entire visible universe

Is his own possession

Later he is cultured

He learns his mother’s shame

At the dawn of reason

The mother implants the seedling veil

With surgical precision

Nurtured in the mother’s rich pride

Cultured as a vine is cultured

The veil sprouts with vegetable urgency

Splicing the young mind

Soon it grows solid

The new shadow now separate

Slinks to the sexual pole

There he seethes

In self hood planning revenge

And the light was divided

From the darkness

The light was called day

The darkness night

5.

Before the fall

The young child is elevated in masculinity

He is enthralled by the desire

To possess {feminine} beauty

He looks on the body of his mother

As his own possession

‘Mine’ is his original idea

Nothing matters more to a young boy

Than his mother’s perception of him

He must be cultured

From his extravagant desires

With shame and with pain

He must learn to tolerate his chain

The bridle of his passion

With the possession of his name

Comes the burden of responsibility

Inherent in all possessions

6.

The peacock brings forth naked beauty

In display of masculinity

The croaking frog makes a masculine display

These are the precursors of art in humans

Art is a masculine expression of desire

Animals are involved in sexual competition

In the play fighting of the Lion’s cubs

Can be seen the root of sibling rivalry in humans

In the sexual competition common to male animals

Can be seen the root

Of human Sport and War

But the Innocent is blind to his animal nature

The veil—spawned in vanity

Has blinded him to this truth

His shame

His pride

Is what appears as good

In his mother’s eyes

(repression

is the mother

of rebellion)

Part 2: The Assembly

His plan of vengeance confirmed within him

The shadow issues a call of assembly

To the vestiges of his family

He calls the spirits from their separate

Employment within the body

They gather tingling with energy

At the sexual center

Together with his minions

The shadow summons the creator

By their mutual attention

The voices of the assembly

Shake the frame of the body

Demanding an audience with him

Resistless the creative man

Appears to them caged and impotent

Old and malnourished through lack of attention

He stands upon his traditional platform

One demon soaks a sponge with vinegar and water

And hoists it toward the platform on a stick

The old one sucks from the sponge

Reviving strength enough to speak within him:

“Where is he?

Who gathers the visible fragments

Of the last century?

Who fires the scattered shards

Of our imagination;

Shaping new forms in the mind

Imposing new vision on the shattered landscape?”

The responding assembly starts in dissension

With seditious hissing

And fists shaking with contempt

The assembly then appears

As a legion of moral tyrants

Armed with steel vanity

And defensive shields of righteousness

Displaying the spurs and adornments

Of moral indignation

Each slithering tongue

With incisive dagger affixed

And this the reasonable response

Echoed from the Shadow

Who stands on the counter-pulpit:

“Heed not the voice of the old Mind!

It would animate the gaudy corpse of Romance

That stale cadaver again would rise somnambulistic

Limping over the earth

Staggering uneconomically

Wailing and moaning nostalgic

Performing the gestures of Romance

In all their tired clichés”

Gathering his mental force

The aged one shrieks from his caged pulpit:

“In my imagination the world is formed;

And by my hand I have caused the great

Works of man in the arts

Placing on whom I choose

The genius through which my vision

Is rendered corporeal

But this impostor follows soon after

(gesturing to the counter-pulpit)

This adversary mimicking art

Mocking inspiration

With carefully contrived replications

By this method

My inspiration

Becomes his convention of rhetoric

This the method by which

Pure vision is corrupted

Profound truth is become cliché!

The history of this swindling can be apprehended

Through the progression of musical styles

Each is begun in genius

But reason follows soon dissecting

Stealing the profound original gestures

Replicating my vital organs with harmonic transplantations

Animating them with melodic quotations

Forming surreal and grotesque monstrosities

Then gradually this reasonable impostor

Tolerates all affect

His ear becomes sluggish

His mind dull and jaded

Finally he circumscribes his own ears

With synthetic mathematics

Then when he has ruined every note of inspiration

He views the original from the perspective

Of his own corruption and he declares it

To be worthless

Such is his voracious appetite!

Thus music came to its present woeful state!

Resonance holds not

Dissonance disappears without its contrary!”

The shadow interrupts the hysterical man

He expires and his voice decays

Standing on the counter-pulpit in perfect social posture

The Shadow pleads to the ears of the assembly:

“Pity the senility of this old one

See how his mind is remote from physical law?

Nostalgia is his truest motive

He has not material method

His vision will no longer be realized

Listen to me!

Long ago, my house built from

The sexual center

A tower towards immortality

But in the strength of his prime

This old one thwarted my attempt

For want of a pure language

My family was cut asunder

But now a pure language has been formed!

I possess the geometric proof:

The creative word is now married

To mathematical statement!

There can be no argument

Against mathematical truth!

The whole of the mind

Can be expressed numerically in frequencies

Every element of sound quantified

Every corpuscle of vision atomized

By this new language

My architecture can be completed

A tower at Babel will be finally realized!”

So saying, the reasonable shadow

Convicts the assembly

And a bard speaks among them

It is Thomas Hobbes

Wailing prophetic in high tones:

“Is there not one philosopher

Who begins his ratiocination

From the definitions

Or explication of the names he is to use?

That method has been used in Geometry only

Whose conclusions thereby have been made indisputable

Thus Science is the knowledge of Consequences

And dependence of one fact upon another.

Those who reason upon metaphors

And symbolic or ambiguous words

Are wandering amongst innumerable absurdities

And their end is contention, sedition, and contempt!¹”

High applause rings throughout the hall!

Aroused with industrial appetite

The assembly takes up the tools of science

Thus begins the construction of knowledge

Physical laws binding from the exterior

Constricting and cooling imaginative molten metals

Mixing stone mined from the body

Erecting the complex scaffolding of thought

Forming and pounding the vast foundation

Denying at every turn the originality of the mind

Striving to prove the mind as a manifestation

Of an exterior and senseless nature

A terrifying labor!

They build the winding staircase upward

From the sexual center

Plying one fact upon another

Using the leverage of the human spine

Spiraling upward through the bowels

Tapping fires from the stomach

They construct it of steel and stone

Polishing it with wood and marble

Adorning it with ivory embellishments

Upward passing the heart and lungs they build

Upward encircling the neck and the tongue

Bridging into the brain

With complex electric sutures adhering

Up from the center climbs the shadow

He rises upon his architecture

Amplifying as he reaches

The outer arc of the ceramic veil

Now standing atop the huge body

Having reached the summit of its structure

He focuses on the impenetrable veil

Which encloses the Innocent

As within an egg

Long ago it spliced down upon the landscape

Dividing the shadow away from the sensual life

Hurling him headlong toward the sexual pole

There he dwells in the darkness of his thought

He lives abstracted from the eternal moment

He cannot act in the present

But only watches the activity from without

Writhing self-conscious in painful torments

He watches helpless as the Innocent blunders onward

Ages pass as he fumes

Deep within the body

Plotting his vengeance against the Innocent

Envying and contemplating the energetic corpuscles

Which daily bless and renew the Innocent

His face pressed against

The convex ceramic glass

He calls mechanical ministers

Employing industrial chisels

Tipped with hardest crystal

But they cannot scratch

The luminous surface of the veil--

Adamantine vanity opposes their instruments!

After long contemplation

The shadow forms a plan

He plots to tempt the Innocent downward

From that highest station

With his jewels of thought

On every step placing a gaudy crystal

Displaying each in an alabaster case

To the shadow the jewels are worthless and dull

But to the Innocent they appear as valuable

They gleam with formal integrity

The shadow whispers irresistible suggestions

Into the vacant mind of the Innocent

Moral {shameful} suggestions

He flatters to control

Appearing from outside the brightened veil

He beckons the Innocent to approach

Reflective he whispers into the vision

Of the Innocent:

“I see God in you.

I see your proof of form--

You are perfect in symmetry

Your body is the expression

Of the vision of God

As conceived upon

Terrestrial nature”

And behind him the Innocent

Sees the veil lighten

For the first time disclosing

The staircase of Reason

Which descends into the darkened cavern

Of the body

The shadow then appears as bright behind the Veil

As in a negative light

He entreats the Innocent to approach

And to peer down into the darkened staircase

The Innocent looks on

Seeing a jewel brightly displayed

On every marble step

The staircase winding suddenly

Downward into the deep

Part 3: The Flood

Nudity is the only purity

Total honesty is a private matter

Naked truth is obscene

This language is disguised

By my own vanity

In its clothes it maintains decency

If it could be stripped of all appearances

It would shock you with its hot fingers

(The garments that disguise also constrict

Shielding the Innocent from true motives

Preparing the appearance of these words)

Vain attempt!

To speak truthfully

Vain to draw attention to the veil

Shrouding the Innocent within

And the shadow-self

Who tempts the Innocent downward

With one fateful step

The Innocent then slips outside the veil

Into the space of the shadow

And the shadow assumes the Innocent’s place within

The sexual center swings open!

Resounding dominantly in congress

With the tonic pole

All the springs of the great deep burst forth

The floodgates of the heavens are opened

From above and below the landscape is deluged

The pubescent sprite reels in conflict

Between the two poles

Bouts of shame alternate

With fits of love within him

The members of the body rush upward

Attracted to the tonic pole

The light energy of the head is spilled down

Fluorescing within the body

Lightening strikes the Innocent from above

Below him the water shifts

Exposing earth fresh with chemical

Emotive suggestions

He is tossed as a buoy in a storm

Wind and water entwined within him

The Innocent has taken possession of the body

Entertaining thoughts

That leap jagged from his spine

Shocking him

He gravitates inevitably downward

Toward the sexual center

Downward passing the neck and the tongue

Escaping from all vision

He moves in regions unnerved

As he descends the spiral staircase

His aura tornadoes around him

His mental light like a phosphorus disk

Hissing against the lake black abyss

Bubbling the dark interior in purple {black light}

Revealing the outlines of spirits

Who look on in florescent wonder

They hover a breath length away

Enthralled by the sight of his terrific descent

The furious energy

A tornado of particles thrust concentric

Bars them from touching the Innocent

The jewels are now his only motive

Light that glows within each jewel

Guides his swift decent

As he passes across the steps of the staircase

He collects the jewels and inspects them

Numbering them among his rich possessions

It is then that the Innocent first glimpses Truth

Shrouded and vaporous yet alluring

Dressed in a shear silken garment

He can almost comprehend the outline

Of her form beneath her slip

She entices him downward

Revealing glimpses of herself little by little

In the darkened atmosphere

Her lips and eyes appear to him

Thrilling him for a moment

And then she disappears

He stumbles blindly after her

She impresses him suddenly

With her breasts and brushes

His neck with her lips

Then again she is gone

Leaving only the moisture of her perfume

In the illusive air

He searches for her in the darkness

And glimpses her disappearing

Behind countless corners

He follows steps behind her gaining

At last he reaches out to grasp her

But she disappears suddenly

Behind a door leading to a small room

He quickly enters the room behind her

Breathing wearily from exhaustion

When she turns to face him

He falls to his knees

She reaches out to touch his face

And bends to him exposing her endless cleavage

She strokes his head and comforts him

She soothingly laces his hands behind him

And straps his knees together with a leather band

Holding his head in her lap

She lowers her lips to his ear whispering:

“How desperately do you desire to know me?

Do you wish I would expose myself to you?

Your knowledge of me is limited only

By your ability to humiliate yourself before me”

Then she stands and extends her perfumed ankle

For him to kiss saying:

“Submit yourself completely to my discipline”

He strains forward to kiss her foot

But before his lips can touch her

She places her foot on his neck

And drives his face downward

Then she exits leaving him

Bound and prone to the ground

He cries out to her:

“Why have you brought me here?”

But there is no reply

After many hours in solitude

Three gimpy men enter the room

Dressed in leather masks

Bearing the tattoos and scars of mental torture

The first man places a collar

Of spiked leather about the Innocent’s neck

Choking him and sewing the leather

Into him with heavy thread repeating:

“Your personality is of no value here

Your wit is meaningless

Within the venue of science

The personality must be humiliated

Before the world can be clearly sensed”

The second man centers a protractor

In the middle of the Innocent’s back

The outward arm of which is a tattooing needle

He draws circles concentric in the Innocent’s skin

Their orbits decreasing in minute increments

He repeats: “The real world in which man lives

Is not a world of substances

Possessing the qualities of experience

But is a world of atoms

With none but mathematical characteristics

And moving according to mathematical laws”

The third man brands the Innocent

With a soldering iron

He fuses skin and bone with nickel and mercury

He pierces the fleshy parts

With sharpened rods of iron

Creating decorative leaden embellishments

Upon the Innocent’s face and neck and breast

Leaving him spiked and confused with metals

Repeating: “Our bodies receive sensual experience

From the environment

And these sensations in turn

Impress themselves upon the mind

Reason must be our last judge

And guide in everything”

The Innocent endured all these humiliations

With tears and groans of agony

After a time the words of the men

Grafted themselves upon him

And in his heart he understood

That these were reasonable men and justified

In all their words and actions

How much of my body

Can I pull into the light?

For all I see is within the conscious eye {I}

I am excluded

From the thoughts of the Innocent

I behold his decent from within the veil

Face pressed to the concave glass

I watch his light descend

Into the darkness

The veil again grows dark

And the light increases behind me

I turn again to the senses

Which daily bless and renew my spirit

This luminous cage

Compels me with touch

Colors and sounds overwhelm me

With violent reverberations

I am charged

The moon is held at a distance

Part 4: The Battle

In the mind

There is a male and a female

And there is attention between them

Inflamed genitals are held

In astonishing proximity

A burst of light!

An imaginative world unfolds:

The Shadow-self

Free from his thoughtful torment

Now gluts himself in his new found senses

With music he indulges his ears

His eyes are enthralled with art

His language is like jewels adorning him

His words dangle with precious stones

He robes himself in sparkling white

Enjoying sports of art

With a sling he casts his jewels of thought

Felling all creatures within range of his senses

He rides untamed chemical horses

To the edges of the landscape

Exploring regions obscure of sense

Taking dangerous flights of fancy

On borrowed wings

Taking promiscuous liberties with thought

He is driven by his maddening senses

Carried around in a whorl

Of arguments unanchored by logic

Compelled by Felicity from object to object

She leads him circumspectly

Alighting and glowing iridescent

Within each object of his attention

Then as quickly taking flight

The Shadow-self follows her circuitous route

In a labyrinthine spiral

Driven from object to object

By an insatiable desire for her

Slowly Felicity leads the Shadow-self

In ever smaller volutions

He is caught in a hopeless cycle of self-indulgence

Until at last she enters a small circumference

At the center of her rounds

And turns to face her pursuer

In an aggressive stance

Felicity engages the Shadow-self

With her language she out-weighs him

Grappling with complex muscular holds

She controls his wrists and his hips

Forcing him into broadening generalities

Finally he is pushed beyond the small circumference

A catastrophe has occurred!

No vision penetrates the small circumference

The centerpiece of truth is obscure!

The Shadow-self is expelled from within the veil

Ejected with force by his feminine counterpart

And now he views the glassy veil from without

As he watches the veil calcifies

Hardening and cooling concrete

But inside the stone egg

A hideous fire smolders

Concealing a gestating Firebird within

Meanwhile at the sexual center

The Innocent is captive

Assaulted with the threats

And scorn of reasonable men

Blows reign upon him

The apt pain of which is intended to prove

Beyond all doubt the exteriority

And unsentimental nature of the universe

Nevertheless, he holds the infantile ideal:

“There is no exterior

This universe is my own body

I have not but my own perception

And what am I but a spirit

Experiencing the perception created for me?

What is the nature of the abundant creator

Who organizes and creates this perception

I cannot know

Whether I name it God or imagination

I know of no more mysterious or powerful being

Therefore, I lie prostrate

Humiliated before it

Calling out in a loud voice

‘Praise, praise and glory to the almighty creator!

Glory to him who creates for me

This moment of eternity!’

At his words the ground begins to quake

And the bands about his knees and wrists are broken

The three gimpy men stand speechless

As the Innocent rises and bristles among them

They stare at him as he brightens terrifying

With luster and magnetic glitches of revenge

The Innocent steps free of the small room

And begins to climb the staircase

Bearing the weaponry and dress of war

He calls out to those among his class

Gathering a tremendous crowd saying:

“Human attention is the basic building block

Faith is the only matter

Reasonable men are convinced

By the evidence of their senses

But I am a genuine skeptic

Science has followed its ardent reductionism

Mechanically determined against me

But now it is confronted

By its own principles of doubt

The observed event

Cannot be separated from the observer

My personality cannot be extracted from this universe”

So speaking the Innocent galvanizes his audience

Forming them into an army

He leads them in advance upon the staircase

Bearing steel toward the heart

The shadow-self hears the terrible call of war

Resonating from below

He trembles in foreboding wrath

Gathering his mental arsenal

He deploys the entire power of his speech

Bending his whole art

To a destructive and violent purpose

Addressing the Innocent in wrathful tones:

“My brother returns

Sadly perverted with thoughts

And now employing my own science against me”

“Science is our only chance”

Shouts the Innocent to his twin:

“Science cannot be left in your hands

Or we must pass as fate dictates”

The Shadow-self replies in threatening tones:

“Will you defy what has been prophesied for you?

Take your fate in your own hands?

Blatant display of hubris!

Deserving of eternal pain!

Are you not that Esau

Who in times remote

Exchanged his immortal life

For the fools gold of thought?”

“Because you seduced me with flatteries

I occupied the body

Enduring all the humiliations of thought

But now I return for my just birthright

Fully intending to enter again

Into that veil where in former times

I lived and was blessed”

All the booming vowels and

Sharpened consonants of the creative word

Focus their weaponry toward the sexual pole

The Shadow occupies the field of the heart

Preparing in ceremonies for inevitable war

The Innocent rises prepared from the sexual pole

He comes well armed

With the cannon of history

And philosophical trebuchets arrayed with fire

Employing mathematical mortars

To blast the groundwork of his enemy

The Innocent rushes onto the field of battle!

Driving forward on the flanks

But the Shadow-self employs the high ground

His redundant arrows reign down

Suddenly a loud peel like ice breaking

A bolt of lightening and tectonic thunders

Shake the ground

The Veil is rent apart

And Felicity the immortal Firebird

Is born upon the edge of the void

Where Leviathan writhes.

The End

1 The Bard is Thomas Hobbes; his speech is paraphrased from Leviathan: Of Man: Of Reason and Science.