UN ANE AUX CIEUX

Un âne descendait au galop la science.
— Quel est ton nom? dit Kant. —Mon nom est Patience,
Dit l'âne.

*****

Granted that true beauty is to be apprehended only in the lofty reaches of philosophy, whose somnolent towers are wrapped about in the apparitions of funneling language, and granted that the ascent is always more difficult than the descent, as long as the laws of gravity hold, I tripped on a rock on the way up the peak.

-- O rock! I said -- Diamonds and fanatic rubies, you who are stained with my blood -- and I called the tempests to me, and the churning winds, and I cracked my scepter against the rock harder than Aeolus or Moses, so that for days this echoing cry filled the mountains: You mean nothing!

Now the heights might be impassable, fogged up with glass as they are, to mere mortal minds, and I don't know if, from those surpassing cliffs, one can see the tips of archipelagos sumberged in the structure of floods, depths extending to summits unknown; or if a shroud of hyperluminous darkness cloaks every star in the gyring genesis of eternity; or if that rock is as endlessly finite and brittle as the perfidious and tottering point of my fall...

What I do know is that life, for all its extravagance, perceives an end, and in this ending, if one can grasp it, is the apex of the whole rocky structure, as if one could embrace slopes of crystal by fastening to their innermost bulwarks, or something like the play of light. Here is not a record of my travels, but an allegory of my defeats, and I leave it to you, God, whose manifest existence I might doubt, to unknot the twists, tie up the ends, and resolve the solvent bits into a single thread. Then, if you can lead yourself out of the darkness, then, if you can shape trees and majesties, then, if you can brush a woman's face lighter than gold, I will proclaim you a master of painting, and hand you my share of the games. Lector intende: laetaberis.