Parables

    To Accompany Twelve Water- colors by L.
    Albert-Lasard

      Suddenly a strident anger rims through
      the aviary. They rise astonished       and take off one by one into the unreal.
       &nbspR. M. RILKE, The Flamingos
         &nbsp(Jardin des Plantes)

    Man is neither angel nor beast.

      Blaise Pascal

    When there were no more than Beast and Angel,
    And GOD lively everywhere, in that Garden;
    The flyers in the air, and on the ground The crawlers, and in
    the profound Soundless abyss the darting shiverers;

    When God and Things and Beasts and Angels
    And Light the Archangel were all that were:
    It was the epoch of the pure.

    Pure the Lion, pure the Ant,
    Pure the Bull and the Serpent,
    Pure the Dragon, pure the Virtues,
    Pure the Thrones and the three high Orders;

    Pure was the Earth, pure was the Light,
    They were all pure,
    Each being that which he was,
    Each doing that for which he was made,
    Faultless and marvelous:

    Each the fruit of a Thought of life
    Exactly converted,
    Without remainder.

    And I, all this I knew
    With an utter strange clarity;
    And yet was aloof, standing
    Apart from my inward word.

    And then, as I was this notable distraction,
    No longer a someone, no more than my own fraction,
    As my mind's eyes reflected this purity,
    Receiving as the mirror of a calm water
    The balance and brilliance of things without flaw,
    Innocent of notion,

    Look! from between the leaves came
    To light a Figure, a Figure came
    Into the light,
    Looked all about him,

    And he was "neither Angel nor Beast."

    The glass of my sheer presence quivered
    As the calm of a calm water
    Wrinkles to the course of a form,
    Or as when from the full depths and the height's
     &nbspshadows
    Glances without emerging
    A creature one never sees.

    On my enchantment's mirror of virgin duration
    Appeared a trembling;
    Over the forehead of the pure hour scuttered
    A kind of question that bowled like a leaf
    The rosy picture; and like a cry,
    Like the grip of an unexpected hand,
    An unknown power was closing about my heart.

    Man was this event:
    Such the name that I give you.

    I knew, as if within him, that he was neither
      ANGEL nor BEAST:

    By unexampled suffering I knew him,
    Unexampled, unpicturable,
    And nowhere in the body;

    A wonder of incomparable suffering
    As of the sole and insupportable Sun
    Whose anguish lights the world....
    O pain of the Sun they call joy and splendor,
    Your brilliance is a bitter cry, your agony
    Burns the eye! ...

    He felt, there was, I sensed it,
    A presence of sorrow apart,
    Denied to the Pure Existences,
    Neither ANGEL nor BEAST can sustain it.

    For ANGEL is ANGEL, BEAST BEAST,
    Nothing of either is a thing of the other,
    There is nothing between them.
    But he was neither the one nor the other,
    This I sensed with instant perfect knowledge,
    Knowledge of suffering, suffering of knowledge;
    And MAN's silence and my silence
    Were interchanging spirits instant by instant....

    "Angel," said in me He whose absolute presence
    I had made my own:
    "Angels," he said to them,
    "Eternal marvels of light and love,
    Pure acts
    O only knowable by desire,
    By hope, by pride, by love,
    By all that is a presence of absence, You are
    Still mysteries that burn
    A little higher than my highest I....

    "But you, beast,
    The more I regard you the more I become MAN
    In Mind, O Beast,
    And the more you become strange,
    For Mind knows only the things that are of Mind.

    "In vain by Mind I hunt you,
    In vain by Mind set snares
    Baited with gifts of Mind:
    Origin? PURPOSE? PRINCIPLE? CAUSE?
    (Or chance even, and all the TIME that needs)
    O life,
    The more I think of you, O LIFE,
    The less to thought you yield....

    "To die, not less than to be born,
    Eludes all thought:
    Love, death, are not for Mind
    That eating amazes, sleeping abashes.
    My face is a stranger;

    The...