PARTISAN REVIEW
make up a universal system of blood circulation that feeds the single
heart of mankind. But we must not steal a march on sensibility, which is
given us only as a distant and obscure foreboding, and substitute fictitious
likeness for the hidden sacred reality. You and I have not a common
cult. It seems to you that oblivion liberates and gives life, and that cul–
tural memory enslaves and deadens; I maintain that it is memory that
liberates, and that it is oblivion that enslaves and deadens. I speak of
the road upward, and you tell me that the wings of the spirit are over–
laden and have forgotten how to fly. "Let us go away," you say, and
I answer: "There is no place to go; displacement of a body on a plane
does not change the nature of the plane nor of the moving body." Once
I wrote:
To you, the ancestral trees
And cemeteries overcrowded;
To us, free nomadic space-
This was the judgment of Beauty.
Betrayal every day
A new camp every day
But at this point the truthful Muse compelled the poet, in rebellion
against cultural tradition, to add:
The wanderer's illusion
Of hopeless captivity.
0 for the sake of the cult one ought to leave the settled places and
the trees of the ancestors :
Brothers, let us leave for the dusk of sacred groves
.
The staff of exile is light to the children of gods,
The flowering staff of new love.
Broad is the flower-bearing earth and there are many clear glades.
They await our lingering lips
The dithyrambic unison of our feet
This
will
be some day, my dear friend, although as yet there are
no signs of such a transformation. Culture will be transformed into a
cult of God and Earth. But this will be a miracle of Memory-mankind's
primal memory. Intrinsically culture is not uniform, just as eternity is
not single, just as the composition of human individuality is multiform.
1044
Seas are movvng within the deep sea, some to ·dawns,
and some to sunsets;
Above, the waves aspire to noon; .below to midnight;
Many currents stream in many channels in the dark deep
And subterranean rivers roll in the purple ocean.
