Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

  Of planetfall, and of his pilgrimage

  Across the twilit and alive new world

  To where the Peacock Mountain soared away

  Into a pinkish sky. But we are near

  The end of our long journey, and must hurry.

  At last the pilgrim came into the presence

  230

  Of that lady it was his oath to kill.

  Chance was there with her, and his other cousins

  Wolf and Irene; one who knew the cast

  And motion of the elder Chance might trace

  The family resemblance in them all.

  At once the Sibyl knew who this man was,

  With his red hair and Garrison’s long face.

  Her mouth turned down with love and pity then,

  And she spoke quickly, softly, to forestall

  Her friends lest they be moved to shield her from him.

  240

  “So you have come. Your name is Flavius,

  And you are kin to us, and you are welcome.

  We do not offer any violence,

  But ask that you stay with us for a while,

  Converse with us, come to know what we are,

  And then decide what it is you must do.

  How would it be if we might speak awhile

  About the beautiful, of what it is

  And how it serves the making of the world…?”

  Now Flavius had a weapon in his coat,

  250

  A handgun, cunningly disguised to look

  And function as a little voice-recorder.

  And as she spoke, almost against his will

  He drew it forth and held it out toward her.

  He could not take his eyes from her; her voice

  Would seem to him the loveliest that there was,

  And she was what all other things were for,

  All other persons’ being strove to be.

  What he would then have done we do not know.

  For now Irene knew why he had come,

  260

  And saw him point a weapon at her daughter.

  At once her training in the martial arts

  (The dark gift of her master Tripitaka,

  The Sibyl’s father, murderer of Chance)

  Caught up her body in its steel pavane,

  And in a flying turn she spun herself

  Against the wavering aim of the assassin.

  It was his slowness in the Martian field,

  Not yet acclimatized to the strange lightness,

  That stumbled her, or he would be disarmed

  270

  And no harm done, so many tears the less.

  He did not know he’d let the weapon fire.

  The crash was black and heavy in the room.

  There was blood everywhere; Irene on

  Her knees, sinking toward the floor; the Sibyl

  With a great stain of red across her side,

  Soaking the clean white garment that she wore.

  A single shot had wounded both of them:

  Irene in the throat, and fatally;

  The Sibyl by the weaker ricochet.

  280

  But now in blinded fury Wolf had flung

  Himself upon the miserable man

  Who, as it were a snake, had dropped his gun;

  The Sibyl shrieked to rob him his revenge,

  And Chance, who’d caught her, swaying, laid her down,

  And tore Wolf’s fingers from the killer’s throat.

  The Sibyl’s wound was bloody but not deep;

  She led the mourners at the funeral

  Of that unhappy lady whom she owed

  Two lives, and who in turn had owed her two.

  290

  Wolf’s madness did not pass for many weeks,

  But in the end the Sibyl healed his soul.

  Flavius got more mercy than he wished:

  The Sibyl would not have him harmed, and Chance

  Argued before the court that he had been

  As if a soldier of a state at war,

  And that it was not certain at that moment

  If his intent had truly been to kill.

  It was decided he should be sent back

  To Earth, to make what covenant he might

  300

  With his unhappy spirit; it was clear

  That now he worshipped what he would have murdered,

  And, for himself, wished nothing but his death.

  Thus justice can be kind and mercy cruel.

  For did the Sibyl know what he would find

  When, after three years’ exile, he returned

  To Earth and sought his home and family?

  And if she did, what may that mean for us,

  Who must—for who is wiser than the Sibyl?—

  Be therefore privy to the inner work

  310

  Of history, when history has meaning?

  Did she thus choose this way to twitch aside

  The curtain on the great dream of the God?

  Is, then, the deepest meaning of the world

  Not just or merciful, but beautiful?

  So Flavius arrived at Devereux

  At dusk on an exhausted autumn day,

  The frost upon the long and rotted grass,

  A red horizon between barren trees.

  This is the last time we shall look upon

  320

  This place, so let us bid a fit farewell.

  He found the windows lit, the offices

  Of the world church bright with activity,

  But no sign of his father or his mother.

  The lodge was empty, and it smelt of stone.

  Upon inquiry Flavius discovered

  That, sick of Devereux, which still reminded

  Him of Gaea and the past, Garrison

  Had moved with Bella to New Mexico

  And opened up the ranch at San Luis Rey.

  330

  Not wishing to announce himself before

  He could explain in full what he had done,

  And ask his father how his duty to him

  Could so conflict with what he felt was right,

  He did not contact anyone, and spent

  The last night of his enormous journey

  In a drab, clean hotel just west of Reading.

  And in the evening of an endless day

  Caught in the limbo of a single hour

  As time-zones reeled away beneath the wings

  340

  (Except for two hours in the terminal

  At DFW, dozing upon

  A row of seating greased with ancient sweat;

  Waking at times to see the afternoon

  Of Texas wane across the deep blue sky

  Feathered with white cloud through the tinted glass),

  He drove a rented car through falling sleet

  Up the strange valley of the Rio Grande.

  Sometimes the ice-fog cleared, the low sun glared;

  In the last light the mesas were gigantic,

  350

  Each with an altar-cloth of soiled snow;

  Soon it grew dark; an Ecotheist preacher

  Was all there was upon the radio.

  Though no one heard his knock, the ranch was lit,

  Uncurtained, with a blare of TV sound.

  He tried the unlocked door and entered in.

  The noise was coming from a backdoor room.

  He pushed on through and this is what he saw.

  A heavy Indian nurse, dazed out with penth,

  But kindly-looking, sprawled before a screen.

  360

  His mother sat up at a kitchen table,

  Rocking herself from side to side as if

  A mechanism with a battery

  Governed a motion slowing gradually

  Until its last reaction should be spent.

  Flavius knew at once that she was mad.

  He could not watch, and left the room unnoticed.

  The living rooms w
ere uninhabited,

  The lights left on, and in some disarray;

  No fires burned in the great hearths, but warmth

  370

  Poured dryly from the heating vents. A sound

  From the old master bedroom caught his ear.

  He turned the doorknob, opened up the door.

  Two bodies swarmed upon the bed, one brown,

  The other white. He thought at first that they

  Were man and woman but a sort of count,

  Of what was what, made it quite clear that both

  Were males, and now he recognized his father,

  And saw the other was an Indian boy.

  As they became aware of him, and broke,

  380

  And stood, attempting with the sheets to hide

  The knowledge of his eyes, he reached across

  And took a shotgun from the rack above,

  And, with a kind of dull surprise, took aim,

  And fired both barrels at his father’s body.

  Would it be different if we had known

  That in these last few months with young Ortiz

  Garrison for the first time in his life

  Had found the happiness that had escaped him?

  That if his son had not returned, his lover,

  390

  Tiring of this adventure, would betray him?

  Is death the worst can happen to a man?

  What if we knew that Flavius’s trial

  Resulted in a brief and lightened sentence;

  That with his care and love through many years

  Bella got back her wits sufficiently

  To play the cello as she used to do

  Sitting beside the window in the scent

  Of springtime in the lodge at Devereux?

  That in the end Flavius would return

  400

  To Mars and die in service of the Sibyl?

  We return to the words of the Sibyl: how truth and goodness are but offshoots of beauty; of the nature of beauty, its reality, its mystical experience, its neurochemistry, its persuasiveness, its reflectiveness, its divinity, its presence in history. A hymn to beauty follows. The author, unable to finish the poem, is blessed by a vision of roses which brings home to him the meaning of the Sibyl’s teaching; and he is thus enabled to pass his conception on to another poet in the distant past.

  Scene v:

  The Roses

  But then the story would renew itself,

  As time does always, as after a sleep

  The healthy body yawns, looks round, begins

  To think about a bite for breakfast; as

  The lover's ardor at a nape or ankle

  Will, after trance, suffuse the world once more

  With warm and lovely colors, delicate.

  But we must strike out at an angle from

  The self-renewing flow of mortal things

  10

  That for a moment we may see their meaning

  And set an end to this one course of time;

  For endings are the pruning of the branch

  That makes it bud, that makes the mystic flower.

  “How do we know the truth,” the Sibyl said,

  “Between two explanations, or a thousand,

  Each with an equal claim to evidence,

  Each with an equal logical coherence?

  It is the beauty of that one which marks it

  So that the scientist-philosopher

  20

  Is in no doubt where our allegiance lies.

  And if we would extract the seed, the essence

  Of the truth, we must know the ways of beauty.

  For beauty is the oneness of the tree

  Of life with and within the tree of knowledge,

  Its oversapience that makes it spring

  To further budding as it mates itself;

  And if that branchingness is all that is,

  Then beauty is the secret name of being.

  Consider how the plants and animals

  30

  Blaze to their loveliest expressiveness,

  The flower, the paroxysm of their song,

  The ritual dance, the flash of scale or feather,

  Just at the moment when they pass their being

  Over to the following generation;

  Thus beauty is continuance of time.

  But sex does not produce a printed copy;

  The being that is reproduced is neither

  Copy nor monster, and the space between

  Is what we mean by beauty, beautiful.

  40

  Survival thus is nothing but transcendence.

  “How may we know the good? Old Socrates

  Who was my friend when I was Diotima,

  Took his last drink because he asked a question:

  Is an act good because the gods have willed it

  Or do the gods will it because it’s good?

  If good is but the power of the gods

  We need no word for it and no concern

  To find it out; it is what we can do

  Because we’re not restrained from doing it.

  50

  How then do the good gods know what’s good?

  What was that light elusive Gautama

  Preached of, behind the netveil of the eye?

  That gentlest of friends, whose feet I bathed

  With tears and myrrh, said that the good was Love,

  And he in turn bathed his disciples’ feet.

  What is it that we love, what draws our love?

  Why do they paint my Krishna’s body blue?

  The heart and inner seed of love is beauty.

  When all commandments have been laid away,

  60

  Being but parables to clothe the soul

  Into her thalamus, her marriage-chamber;

  When every strict accounting of her acts

  Be rendered, stricken from the reckoning;

  When every ‘why’ is answered;—there is left

  But the one law, to love the beautiful.

  “So truth and goodness are the first two leaves

  That branch from the archaic stem of beauty;

  Or better yet, the father and the mother

  Are truth and goodness, but the heavenly child,

  70

  That makes them what they are, and why they are,

  Is the divine fruitfulness of beauty.

  The two great revelations of the Earth

  Were truth and goodness; now we hold the third,

  The cornerstone rejected by the builders,

  The thing we need another world to know,

  The loveliness that is the seed of love.

  As being is the outer form of truth,

  And loving is the outer form of goodness,

  Creating is the outer form of beauty.

  80

  “Those who would be disposed to set it light

  Say beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.

  But all the universe is eyes, and ‘I’s,

  And all that is is what those eyes behold.

  Sensation is the densest form of being,

  Perception is the concretest sensation,

  Esthesis is the sharpest of perception.

  The stone records the presence of a tree

  By mass and by electromagnetism:

  That is the tree’s whole being for the stone.

  90

  The deer can know the tree by shape and color—

  What to the stone would be ghosts invisible.

  The boy who sees the tree as beautiful

  Knows it so much more clearly than the deer

  As does the deer more clearly than the stone.

  The power his species wields to make such judgments,

  Ratified by its mastery of Mars,

  Enfranchises the vision of the boy.

  Ten billion years the universe has labored

  To see itself through our confirming eyes;

  100 />
  That gaze must sum its being as beautiful.

  “And what the mystics felt was nothing less

  Than that totality, that radiance

  Which is the god herself awakening

  To dream herself to being in ourselves.

  Whatever is the whole, the eye that sees it

  Is ecstatic, and must find its proper place

  Outside the boundary of all it sees;

  And in its step back from the living edge

  Of all that is, it grows another limb

  110

  Upon the many-branched frontier of being.

  The dendrites of the great tree of the brain,

  Whose cortex is that single milkwhite rose,

  The living metaphor of the whole world,

  Glow into music as the vision stirs,

  And their soft nodes distil a heady fragrance

  That bells the skull a lanternful of light;

  And the sweet bees of the cell vesicles

  Carry the pollen to the pistilled axon;

  And molecules of pattern never known

  120

  Record the pregnant kiss of mothering.

  The liquor of that consummation drenches

  The forked and blossomed panicles of nerves,

  And forms a mighty image in the eyes

  And words of the illuminated seers,

  The holy shamans and the inflamed saints.

  That image is the trace or touch of God:

  When they would represent it, it appears

  As a mandala or the beating waves

  Of a repeated chant; each circle is

  130

  The new boundary of included time,

  The new high water mark of consciousness.

  Sometimes they sing it as an inner light;

  For as the brute time-beater of the brain

  Is mastered by the sun, an inner sun

  Governs this new testament of time.

  “I have taught how the world is acted through,

  Performed by fiat of its symbiotes.

  What brings them to their vote, their congregation?

  What is the medium of their Amen,

  140

  Affirmed participation in the game?

  What could it be but beauty—harmony

  Promising further, darker melodies,

  Promising struggles to resolve the chord?

  What is it but the ache of a suspense,

  Before the covenanted union comes,

  The drawing out of time from the bent bow,

  That makes a doorframe for Arcadia?—

  Beauty is thus the knitting-in of time,

  That weaves a pattern from the wayward threads.

  150

  “Beauty’s the meaning of the divine dream,