Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

Its principle, the personality

  And mood of the great dreamer of the world.

  If you would know her mind, then study beauty.

  When we have gone out to the edge of things,

  Questioned the very axioms of being,

  Taken the world itself as that computer

  Which stores all knowledge and predicts the future,

  And asked the fatal question of the sphinx

  Whose answer is the answerer itself—

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  What are you? What is your own end and future?—

  Then we have entered in the house of beauty.

  This can’t be proved. But here the world must crack,

  Must grow another layer of itself,

  Even to contemplate the question’s meaning.

  Beauty is what we can affirm outside

  All axioms, all rules of yes and no.

  It is itself the leap of self-inclusion,

  The dark glow of an affirmation deeper

  Than any mandated by axiom;

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  The urge itself of axiomization

  To make a pattern that can grow a mind.

  Beauty is the beginning of the worlds,

  The evolution of the life of being,

  The melt that crystallizes into meaning.

  “That crystal is the hierarchy of being,

  Whose meaning is its very history.

  But as a perfect scale must still be broken

  To make a melody and spin a time,

  As spring must take the frozen forms and melt them,

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  And laughter must succeed to tragedy,

  So every harmony and every structure

  Are but the raw materials of beauty.

  Although no message can be sent or taken

  Without a medium whose shape is clear,

  A perfect carrier-wave conveys no message,

  And time without a difference must cease.

  That which was once the union of the meaning

  With its embodiment in act and form

  Becomes the medium itself of a new gospel:

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  Hierarchy broken for a richer hierarchy.

  That fierce subsumption, as a fire or feast,

  That transubstantiation of the old,

  Is beautiful, and is the tragedy

  And the metabolism of the world.

  When that which is, is that which ought to be,

  The mountains of the world are beaten flat,

  And nothing moves, having no place to go.

  This is a true paradox, that that which is

  Ought not indeed be that which ought to be.

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  “Then ought we simply to accept the flow,

  Make no demand for a consistency

  That must be shattered by the rush of time?

  This is the last temptation, to be quiet,

  Be wise, seek not to know the whole;

  To play the little games time offers us,

  A life just of sensations, not of thoughts.

  But then there should be nothing great to die,

  We should deprive the world of tragedy,

  And everybody would be tourists, passing

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  Through countrysides whose villages are empty,

  Void of committed dwellers in this life;

  The gamblers would have cashed in all their chips,

  Put on their hats and headed for the exits,

  Gods with no mortals to play the game of Troy.

  Time grows by means of the attempts to halt it,

  And freedom is the crash of an achieved will

  Into the fulfillment of its denial.

  Beauty is violence, incipience,

  And transience, the lovelier for what

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  Is sacrificed in that rich wastefulness.

  Beauty is breathtaking and sometimes cruel,

  And would be evil were it not worth all

  We sacrifice so that we might endure it.

  There is no afterlife; eternity

  Is an intenser form of time that strikes

  Out at right-angles from an entire life .

  And knows as many tenses more, and moods,

  As we do than the immemorial beasts.

  Time must be dammed to make this current flow;

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  Light blazes from the point of the resistance.

  “Chance my great-grandfather hurled all his being

  Against the tendency of history;

  My father Tripitaka, in the faith

  That time could be denied, did murder him;

  He in his own time slew himself that we

  Should get a life he served but could not share;

  Great-grandmother Gaea lived a life that I

  Declare as excellent, as sacrificed

  To freedom as our own conquistadors.

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  Charlie would kill a world to give it birth;

  Ganesh could tickle dead things into life.

  Wolf and Irene never found their love,

  Yet were transformed by loss to singing birds;

  Beatrice made a garden from the death

  Of her own inner garden with its seeds.

  My brother Chance might have been president

  Of this republic; he served me instead.

  All knew that life is hungry as a flame:

  Even that man who lately sought my life

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  Was faithful to a thing that defied time.

  “The world-dream of the god is history,

  Whose inner meaning is the joy of dying,

  The flash of light on wheat, on clouds, on eye,

  That dies the moment that it has its being.

  Why should we in our fear of tragedy

  Reserve our gift to beauty lest it die?

  The grief of suffering is the melody

  The goddess sought to be enfranchised by.

  The holiest unworldliness is this:

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  To love the world and die upon its kiss.

  Truth is a dab of scent a girl put on

  You catch upon a lit spring afternoon.

  Truth is a ripple on piano keys,

  Wind in the leaves, moonlight on fruit trees.

  Our cunning sells our birthright for a song—

  Eternity so brief and life so long.

  Give all you have to history, because

  All paradise is here and always was.”

  And this would be the ending of the story

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  Had I disposed material more fitly

  To the first chosen and constraining form:

  So law may force on us unchosen freedoms.

  To tell the truth, I had run out of things

  To say; as the task neared its conclusion

  (Which was to be a summons to my world

  To take up once again the glory road)

  I fell into despair, which was the deeper

  The more I praised the destiny of Mars.

  What was there left for my own ruined planet?

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  I could compose no more, and the long weeks

  Of sodden fall went by, and I was dazed

  And sleepy like a sickly child, and dreamed

  Profusely, strange weary meaningless dreams.

  The last weekend of Fall it was my turn

  To get the writers’ co-op car to drive.

  I was in luck. It was a lovely day,

  Almost like spring, smelling of earth and sea.

  I drove up the Taconic to the lakes:

  Some of the suburbs are inhabited,

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  And the old black folk had put on a display

  Of Christmas decorations, shiny red

  And green, and angels and a plaster crèche.

  Though in the broad daylight it was tawdry,

  It moved me; in a kind of aching joy

  I drove on into the deep country
side

  And stopped beside a tangled entryway

  Where a thick wild scent had attracted me.

  So picking briers from my hair and clothes

  I walked along what must have been a drive,

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  And the cold fragrance grew as I limped on.

  It was a great old mansion—built, perhaps,

  To be the homestead of a stockbroker—

  And it was heaped and overgrown with roses,

  Sprays, drifts, mountains of crimson blossoms,

  Bursting through windows and half-opened doors,

  Climbing the chimneys and the buckled eaves.

  Some hardy strain, most likely, with its roots

  Deep in a septic tank, southern exposure.

  The savage perfume almost knocked me out;

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  But what was strangest was to know these flowers

  As if they never had been cultivated,

  As if they never bore the name of roses,

  As if they were the most natural of plants,

  As if their scent were like the bark or mould

  Of any woodland passing into winter.

  How lovely was the wild scent of this flower!

  Were not all human things as natural,

  Was not all history as sweet as this?

  When I returned I read the Sibyl’s words

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  And saw at once another meaning in them.

  She had been thinking of us after all,

  Even the lost ones in our land of shadows:

  There was a path that such as we might follow.

  I had believed I must be miserable

  In my ill health, and clogged with enemies,

  Discouraged by the State so very gently

  The hero juices never learned to flow:

  I have no testament to make of prison camps,

  Gaunt intellectuals with fiery eyes,

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  Or deaths beneath the clubs of the police,

  So that resistance to this kindly pressure

  Seems the ungratefulness of a spoiled child.

  (When it is less important I will tell

  The game of cat and mouse and quiet betrayal:

  But paranoia, even justified,

  Is not as interesting to the reader

  As to the author—and quite rightly so:

  It is a sickness the authorities

  Use to contain the struggles of the prey.)

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  But now I saw I always had been happy.

  I had my task, my manuscript; so what

  Could they do to me that they had not done,

  Stealing the copies, making sure my friends

  Did not get their promotions or their raises,

  Letting me always know I was observed?

  What was dispiriting was being so near

  The end of all those labors, and the moment

  When I must think upon my death in this

  To me so foreign and so false a land.

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  And all the time, the Sibyl seemed to say,

  As I transcribed but did not hear her words,

  I had been serving history; I was

  The worn stone in its stream that turns its course,

  That multiplied by many, makes the mountain

  That causes it to flow at all. Freedom

  And freedom’s soul, the all-creating beauty,

  Attended me, and made my labors rich.

  If modest talents and a faulty ear

  So flawed the work that it would never stand

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  Beside the giants of the Earth’s wild past,

  Yet this might be the best, because the only

  Epic of protest in our darkening glide;

  And so the opportunity of hope

  Never is absent while time yet endures.

  But what was I to do now it was over?

  Polish, revise of course. There have been those

  Who’ve worn away a mighty oeuvre that way,

  And should be quite content to start again.

  But that would surely be, considering

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  The heroes of my tale, who never let

  Revision dally in the way of action,

  A counter-imitative kind of fallacy,

  Hypocrisy before the gates of being.

  No. For the roses, their solstitial blood

  Casting a haze of incense on the thickets

  Naked of all but a few rattling leaves,

  Trailing their veil, fragrant, invisible,

  Across the hillsides, now reminded me

  Of that bright cave distant by so much space,

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  By such an unimaginable cold,

  Where a girl-Sibyl, pretty in her curls,

  Preached how the universe was yet so young,

  How all this was a prologue to the play.

  This manuscript will perish when I die

  Or when the earnest guardians of our good

  Find it and give it to the cleansing flames;

  But there may be another poet, perhaps

  No better gifted than myself, who will,

  By that communication poets know,

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  Speak it again in quite another form.

  Perhaps he has already, or she has—

  For why should not the conversation pass

  Both ways across the anterooms of time?—

  Perhaps the time I live in fades so fast

  Because its sap has gone to feed a future

  Turned by the least new budding to a way

  I cannot dream. Is there a kind of music

  In the long story of these men and women

  Whose ending may transfigure its beginning,

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  Bury the teller in the telling? Listen.

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  Table of Contents

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface (2011 Edition)

  Introduction

  Dramatis Personae

  Chronology

  General Summary of the Story

  Genealogy

  Act I: The Origins of the War

  Scene i: The Capture of Chance

  Scene ii: Gaea and Garrison

  Scene iii: Ganesh, Charlie, Beatrice

  Scene iv: Sumikami

  Scene v: Tripitaka

  Act II: The Trial of Chance

  Scene i: The Gathering of the Prisoners

  Scene ii: The Fashioning of the Comet

  Scene iii: The Trial

  Scene iv: The Fall of Chance

  Scene v: The Death of the Comet

  Act III: The Mutiny of the Gladiators

  Scene i: Tripitaka and Garrison

  Scene ii: The Olympic War

  Scene iii: The Coming of Tripitaka to Mars

  Scene iv: The Colony

  Scene v: The Seductions of Garrison and Tripitaka

  Act IV: The Gardening of Mars

  Scene i: Wolf and Irene

  Scene ii: The Battle for the Codex

  Scene iii: The Fate of Tripitaka

  Scene iv: The Birth of the Sibyl

  Scene v: The Garden

  Act V: The Words of the Sibyl

  Scene i: The Sibyl's Awakening

  Scene ii: Evolution and the City

  Scene iii: The Tree of Life

  Scene iv: The Passing of Gaea

 
Scene v: The Roses

  Colophon