disappointment in your own Being and the self-contempt that comes along
with that and the increasing hatred for the world that all of that generates (or
degenerates).
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?What if she who has been betrayed, now driven by desperation, is now
determined to face all the incoherence of past, present and future? What if she
decided to sort through the mess, even though she has avoided doing so until
now, and is all the weaker and more confused for it? Perhaps the effort will
nearly kill her (but she is now on a path worse than death in any case). To re-
emerge, to escape, to be reborn, she must thoughtfully articulate the reality
she comfortably but dangerously left hidden behind a veil of ignorance and
the pretence of peace. She must separate the particular details of her specific
catastrophe from the intolerable general condition of Being, in a world where
everything has fallen apart. Everything—that’s far too much. It was specific
things that fell apart, not everything; identifiable beliefs failed; particular
actions were false and inauthentic. What were they? How can they be fixed,
now? How can she be better, in the future? She will never return to dry land
if she refuses or is unable to figure it all out. She can put the world back
together by some precision of thought, some precision of speech, some
reliance on her word, some reliance on the Word. But perhaps it’s better to
leave things in the fog. Perhaps by now there just isn’t enough left of her—
perhaps too much of her has been left unrevealed, undeveloped. Maybe she
simply no longer has the energy....
Some earlier care and courage and honesty in expression might have saved
her from all this trouble. What if she had communicated her unhappiness with