Toward the Gulf | Page 7

it came on her father before her, And she became a Christian
Scientist,
And led an exemplary life.

Deborah was a Puritan of Puritans,
Her list of unmentionable things

Tabooed all the secrets of creation,
Leaving politics, religion, and
human faults,
And the mistakes most people make,
And the natural
depravity of man,
And his freedom to redeem himself if he chooses,

As the only subjects of conversation.
As a twister of words and
meanings,
And a skilled welder of fallacies,
And a swift emerger
from ineluctable traps of logic,
And a wit with an adder's tongue,

And a laugher,
And an unafraid facer of enemies,
Oppositions,
hatreds,
She never knew her equal.
She was at once very cruel, and
very tender,
Very selfish and very generous
Very little and very
magnanimous.
Scrupulous as to the truth, and utterly disregardless of
the truth.
Of the keenest intuitions, yet gullible,
Easily used at times, of erratic
judgment,
Analytic but pursuing with incredible swiftness
The
falsest trails to her own undoing--
All in all the strangest mixture of
colors and scent
Derived from father and mother,
But mixed by
whom, and how, and why?
Now for the son named Herman, rebel soul.
His brow was like a loaf
of bread, his eyes
Turned from his father's blue to gray, his nose

Was like his mother's, skin was dark like hers.
His shapely body,
hands and feet belonged
To some patrician face, not to Marat's.

And his was like Marat's, fanatical,
Materialistic, fierce, as it might
guide
A reptile's crawl, but yet he crawled to peaks
Loving the hues
of mists, but not the mists
His father loved. And being a rebel soul

He thought the world all wrong. A nothingness
Moving as malice
marred the life of man.
'Twas man's great work to fight this Giant
Fraud,
And all who praise and serve Him. 'Tis for man
To free the
world from error, suffer, die
For liberty of thought. You see his
mother
Is in possession of one part of him,
Or all of him for some
time.
So he lives
Nursing the dream (like father he's a dreamer)
That

genius fires him. All the while a gift
For analytics stored behind that
brow,
That bulges like a loaf of bread, is all
Of which he well may
boast above the man
He hates as but a slave of faith and fear.
He
feeds luxurious doubt with Omar Khyam,
But for long years neglects
the jug of wine.
And as for "thou" he does not wake for years,
Is a
pure maiden when he weds, the grains
Run counter in him, end in
knots at times.
He takes from father certain tastes and traits,
From
mother certain others, one can see
His mother's sex re-actions to his
father,
Not passed to him to make him celibate,
But holding back in
sleeping passions which
Burst over bounds at last in lust, not love.

Not love since that great engine in the brow
Tears off the irised wings
of love and bares
The poor worm's body where the wings had been:

What is it but desire? Such stuff in rhyme
In music over what is
but desire,
And ends when that is satisfied!
He's a crank.
And follows all the psychic thrills which run
To
cackles o'er the world. It's Looking Backward,
Or Robert Elsmere,
Spencer's Social Statics,
It's socialism, Anarchism, Peace,
It's
non-resistance with a swelling heart,
As who should say how truer to
the faith
Of Jesus am I, without hope or faith,
Than churchmen.
He's a prohibitionist,
The poor's protagonist, the knight at arms
Of
fallen women, yelling at the rich
Whose wicked greed makes all the
prostitutes--
No prostitutes without the wicked rich!
But as he ages,
as the bitter days
Approach with perorations: O ye vipers,
The
engine in him changes all the world,
Reverses all the wheels of
thought behind.
For Nietzsche comes, and makes him superman.
He
dumps the truth of Jesus over--there
It lies with his youth's textual
skepticism,
And laughter at the supernatural.
Now what's the motivating principle
Of such a mind? In youth he
sought for rules
Wherewith to trail and capture truths. He found it

In James McCosh's Logic, it was this:
Lex Exclusi Tertii aut Medii,

Law of Excluded Middle speaking plain:
A thing is true, or not true,

never a third
Hypothesis, so God is or is not.
That's very good to
start with, how to end
And how to know which of the two is false--

He hunted out the false, as mother did--
Requires a tool. He found it
in this book,
Reductio ad absurdum; let us see
Excluded middle use
reductio.
God is or God is not, but then what God?
Excluded
Middle never sought a God
To suffer demolition at his hands

Except the God of Illinois, the God
Grown but a little with his
followers
Since Moses lived and Peter fished. So now
God is or
God is not. Let us assume
God is and use reductio ad absurdum,

Taking away the rotten props, the posts
That do not fit or hold, and
let Him fall.
For if he falls, the other postulate
That God is not is
demonstrated. See
A universe of truth pass on the way
Cleared by
Excluded Middle through the stuff
Of thought and visible things, a
way that lets
A greater God escape, uncaught by all
The nippers of
reductio ad absurdum.
But to resume his argument was this:
God is
or God