Eye of God: Passages 29

Cao-Dai

gold and crystal of the Sky's reaches!

First from the Father glance that lit

New Love in Liberty whose law

dissolves in its corruscations

(rainbow) (lapis lazuli)

the chains of Eros and the Old Law!

Christmas Eve, 1925. The Spirit descended

to bring the Truth to Viet-Nam.

Réjouissez-vous de cette fête

anniversary of my coming to the West

to give my Sign

that certain hearts tremble

and pour out from their reserves

enduring Love...

Du haut de la tour sans toit où I Extase m'a porté:

j'ai regardé le monde triste et froid, noir et agité.

From the height of the endless tower where Ecstasy carried me:

I have gazed at the world in the black, sad and cold,

agitated .. .

Du haut de la tour sans toit où la Foi m'a élevé:

jai vu la mer d'en haut gardant la sérénité bleue

d'une Vierge qui ne se dévoile .

And the black opend up, a god

in trouble came, like an eye opening,

lids of the sorrow and the cold trembling,

into a glance, striking...

it was no more than a feather lost in the tumult

turnd, high in the up-wind

he fell so far from her

[as ifa hand sustaind me

Day opend in the Abyss

his glance awakening _ flames in the under-ground

And the angels, shaking with love, regarded her.

The Xerubim, the great twins, who cleave one to the other,

the legions of anger and the hosts of wrath,

the constellations of morning and of evening

the Powers, the Intelligences, longd to see

this sister born of paradise and of hell

T Ange Liberté.

The visage of the Father undergoes changes in the thot of her,

His rage falters, returns, falters . . .

in the chains of the First Eros, AntEros / longs to be free.

*

From the height of the endless tower whereto Faith lifted me:

I have seen the sea from above

guarding the blue serenity of a Virgin

who does not reveal Herself.

Du haut de la tour sans toit où l'Espérance m'a conduit:

jai vu l'étoile d'un matin sans soir et un jour infini-

Ihave seen the star ofa morning without night and an infinite day.

Whereto Love brought me:

I gazed upon the source, my Lord the Sun,

that illumines the Earth.

From the height of the tower that has no end:

I have seen the ship of shadows cross the sea of light

/ and, beyond words,

I have contemplated the Regulator of the Stars,

Commissar of Invisible and Visible Worlds;

the President of the Grand Symphony

for the sake of a dread calm and harmony

sets into motion a counter-point of contending elements,

music's divine Strife. At Montségur,

that the heart be tried,

Corba de Perella,

Ermengarde d'Ussat,

Guilleline, Bruna, Arssendis,

Guillaume de I'Isle,

Raymond de Marciliano,

Raymond-Guillaume de Tornabois,

Arnald Domerc,

Arnald Dominique,

these among the seventeen

receiving the consolamentum to join the two hundred and ten perfecti

at the field of the fiery martyrs, Champs de Cramatchs,

until the name of the Roman Church with its heapt honors

stinks with the smell of their meat burning

enter as notes of a sublime sweetness

the resounding chords of wrath and woe. Grandeur!

At the Saint-Siège Caodaiste at Tay-Ninh,

in the roaring din of American planes

performing their daily missions to destroy

the Viet-Cong's strongholds of the Holy Spirit,

the prayers of the shaman-priests at the altar

rise / and in the crescendo of the War,

exact the line ofa melody / as if

the faith of Schubert would enter the Heraklitean truth,

the polemic

father of all, harsh necessity,

in the roar and fire-fall,

bear

this sonance, his son,

and the Note to mount

they sound

sentences of an inaudible bell.