Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Visitor

On whom should we meditate as the visitor? Which of the many is she? Is she that by which we smite, retain, caress, hoodwink, abide, separate the blind mole from the horse piss?

Or is she that other, living in the mind or the intellect as deformation, harmony, diligence, modesty, mischief, mortification, delight, vigilance, flattery, amazement, barnacles, villainy, traffic, innocence, metal, corn, wine or oil: all names for those many intelligences?

First she becomes the brine of the astrologer, which is light gathered from all the limbs of the ocean. She nourishes herself within herself as brine. When she injects that brine into a man, she herself is born. That is her first pearl.

The brine merges in the man's body. Because it becomes his body it does not harm him. He nourishes the eye of the woman within himself. Repulse him, for he is crediting the eye.

Before and after the drowning of the eye, she blesses the music, blesses herself. She lives in her music: that is her second pearl.

The visitor being the fool over again, carries the canker of the family, and the fool having completed her mischance, charms and and is cloven again. That is her third pearl.

The Sage said, when lying in the pool: I understood how the knaves twangled. They put me in that hundred-branched hundred-blossomed isle, but I flounced merrily, I flounced like a sparrow!

The Sage flew to the sea-marge, loved all that she troubled, attained the plot of peacocks, became a wager: yes, became a wager.

(Thanks to The Tempest and the Upanishads)

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