Toward the Gulf | Page 8

is not, but if God is
Why pestilence and war, earthquake and
famine?
He either wills them, or cannot prevent them,
But if he
wills them God is evil, if
He can't prevent them, he is limited.
But God, you say, is good, omnipotent,
And here I prove Him evil, or
too weak
To stay the evil. Having shown your God
Lacking in what
makes God, the proposition
Which I oppose to this, that God is not

Stands proven. For as evil is most clear
In sickness, pain and death, it
cannot be
There is a Power with strength to overcome them,
Yet
suffers them to be.
And so this man
Went through the years of life, and stripped the
fields

Of beauty and of thought with mandibles
Insatiable as the
locust's, which devours
A season's care and labor in an hour.
He
stripped these fields and ate them, but they made
No meat or fat for
him. And so he lived
On his own thought, as starving men may live

On stored up fat. And so in time he starved.
The thought in him no
longer fed his life,
And he had withered up the outer world
Of man

and nature, stripped it to the bone,
Nothing but skull and cross-bones
greeted him
Wherever he turned--the world became a bottle
Filled
with a bitter essence he could drink
From long accustomed
doses--labeled poison
And marked with skull and cross-bones. Could
he laugh
As mother laughed? No more! He tried to find
The
mother's laugh and secret for the laugh
Which kept her to the
end--but did she laugh?
Or if she laughed, was it so hollow, forced

As all his laughter now was. He had proved
Too much for laughter.
Nothing but himself
Remained to keep himself, he lived alone

Upon his stored up fat, now daily growing
To dangerous thinness.
So with love of woman.
He had found "thou" the jug of wine as well,

"Thou" "thou" had come and gone too many times.
For what is sex
but touch of flesh, the hand
Is flesh and hands may touch, if so, the
loins--
Reductio ad absurdum, O you fools,
Who see a wrong in
touch of loins, no wrong
In clasp of hands. And so again, again

With his own tools of thought he bruised his hands
Until they grew
too callous to perceive
When they were touched.
So by analysis
He turned on everything he once believed.
Let's
make an end!
Men thought Excluded Middle
Was born for great things. Why that
bulging brow
And analytic keen if not for greatness?
In those old days they thought so when he fought
For lofty things, a
youthful radical
Come here to change the world! But now at last
He
lectures in back halls to youths who are
What he was in his youth, to
acid souls
Who must have bitterness, can take enough
To kill a
healthy soul, as fiends for dope
Must have enough to kill a body
clean.
And so upon a night Excluded Middle
Is lecturing to prove
that life is evil,
Not worth the living--when his auditors

Behold him
pale and sway and take his seat,
And later quit the hall, the lecture left

Half finished.

This had happened in a twinkling:
He had made life a punching bag,
with fists,
Excluded Middle and Reductio,
Had whacked it back and
forth. But just as often
As he had struck it with an argument
That it
is not worth living, snap, the bag
Would fly back for another punch.
For life
Just like a punching bag will stand your whacks
Of hatred
and denial, let you punch
Almost at will. But sometime, like the bag,

The strap gives way, the bag flies up and falls
And lies upon the
floor, you've knocked it out.
And this is what Excluded Middle does

This night, the strap breaks with his blows. He proves
His strength,
his case and for the first he sees
Life is not worth the living. Life
gives up,
Resists no more, flys back no more to him,
But hits the
ceiling, snap the strap gives way!
The bag falls to the floor, and lies
there still--
Who now shall pick it up, re-fasten it?
And so his color
fades, it well may be
The crisis of a long neurosis, well
What
caused it? But his eyes are wondrous clear
Perceiving life knocked
out. His heart is sick,
He takes his seat, admiring friends swarm round
him,
Conduct him to a carriage, he goes home
And sitting by the
fire (O what is fire?
The miracle of fire dawns on his thought,
Fire
has been near him all these years unseen,
How wonderful is fire!)
which warms and soothes
Neuritic pains, he takes the rubber case

Which locks the images of father, mother.
And as he stares upon the
oval brow,
The eyes of blue which flash the light of faith,
Preserved
like dendrites in this silver shimmer,
Some spectral speculations fill
his brain,
Float like a storm above the sorry wreck
Of all his logic
tools, machines; for now
Since pains in back and shoulder like to
father's
Fall to him at the age that father had them,

Father has
entered him, has settled down
To live with him with those neuritic
pangs.
Thus are his speculations. Over all
How comes it that a
sudden feel of life,
Its wonder, terror, beauty