Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing in roughly the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter. Through a thin gauze one sees what looks like a world of gossamer, lighter, more ethereal, of a different quality from the real world. Many people who appear bodily in the real world do not belong there but to this other world. - Kierkegaard
De temporum ratione
The rock is a hard and stern monument
Standing high o'er the wide, white sea
Relentless is the water, and it batters ov'r and ov'r and ov'r again
Against the side of the mure
This clandestinity has torn my appetencies asunder
I am naught here against the surge
It has been trying for centuries
To split the stone
But alas,
Rock is rock and mure is mure
And it is too wondrous a task
To go whither thee should not be
O, but certes time shall take claim!
And spoil her holy hammer on the rock
Bid me then,
Shall any man stand to the side
And worship his lady?
Of Clear Skies an' meurtrières
Listless in manner
Broken in rhyme
Somehow it all comes together
Under the dawning sky
Under the ruthless, sickening sun
Under the olive branch
In the fires of hell's aura
In the breaking dusk of the day
And over the killing fields
And the trenching men
And the workers and builders
On the Tower of Babel
And the harbingers
On the Tower of Babel
It is understood
To those who search for it
And to those who have not
It is understood to the weary
It has been revealed
To bear the cross of existence
In the face of such knowledge
Is incomprehensibly sombre
To war order
Is to face progress
Unmatched progress
Uncontrollable progress
The world is yet to come
The Foreign Eye of God
Before the void, there was God
There was simplicity and order before He spoke
There is simplicity and order now
But wearing a different face
His order surrounds all things
It is eternal
And it binds us
And soon, we shall return to His order
In its true face
The eternality that we speak of
Cannot be its real face
The name that was given to Him
Is doubtless not His real face
And freed from all desire
One doubtless sees a different face
But not his real face
Merely a masque
So it is said:
All forms took shape from the same void
The void was born from the void
Or so it is said
Darkness born from darkness
The beginning of all understanding
Born from the darkness-
And yet I do not control it
The fire of the mind burns and destroys
And the darkness shrinks as the light eats through it
It hungers and it ravages
I cannot hope to hold fire in my palm
I am the darkness
And the fire saps me of strength