Excerpts
From In Parenthesis
On addressing commissioned officers--it was his
favorite theme. John Ball stood patiently, waiting for the
eloquence to spread itself. The tedious flow continued, then
broke off very suddenly. He looked straight at Sergeant Snell
enquiringly--whose eyes changed quietly, who ducked in
under the low entry. John Ball would have followed, but
stood fixed and alone in the little yard--his senses highly
alert, his body incapable of movement or response. The
exact disposition of small things--the precise shapes of
trees, the tilt of a bucket, the movement of a straw, the
disappearing right foot of Sergeant Snell--all minute
noises, separate and distinct, in a stillness charged through
with some approaching violence--registered not by the ear
nor any single faculty--an on-rushing pervasion, saturating
all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed,
millesimal--of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's
contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy.
He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his
feet. Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came--bright,
brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling
crescendo's up-piling snapt. The universal world,
breath held, one half-second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then
the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings
out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through--all
takings-out of vents--all barrier-breaking--all unmaking.
Pernitric begetting--the dissolving and splitting of solid
things. In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up
his mess-tin and hurried within; ashen, huddled, waited in
the dismal straw. Behind "E" Battery, fifty yards down the
road, a great many mangolds, uprooted, pulped, congealed
with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid
boards leading to the emplacement. The sap of vegetables
slobbered the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun.
(IP II, 24)
From The Anathemata In the first month in the week of metamorphosis
the fifth day past at about the sixth hour after the dusk of it towards
the ebb time in the median silences for a second time again in the middle
night-course he girds himself. Within doors, attended with lamps lighted.
No hill-pastores lauding for Burning Babe for Shepherd-Bearer. Nor
now far-duces star-night nor swaddlings now: His praetexta
is long since cast, Is it the tinctured picta he puts on? Yes, and
the flowered palmata by anticipation: this is 'his own rainment'.
Not Lalla, Lalla, lallla not rockings now nor clovered breath for
the health of him as under the straw'd crucks that baldachin'd in star-lit
town where he was born, the maid's fair cave his dwelling. (Anathemata,
193f)
From Epoch and Artist
"A man can not only smell roses (some beasts may do that, for lavender
is said to be appreciated in the Lion House) but he can and does and ought
to pluck roses and he can predicate of roses such and such. He can make
a signum of roses. He can make attar of roses. He can garland them
and make anathemata of them. Which is, presumably, the kind of thing
he is meant to do. Anyway, there's no one else can do it. Angels can't nor
can the beasts. No wonder then that Theology regards the body as a unique
good. Without body: without sacrament. Angels only: no sacrament. Beasts
only: no sacrament. Man: sacrament at every turn and all levels of the 'profane'
and 'sacred', in the trivial and in the profound, no escape from sacrament."
(Epoch and Artist, p 166-167)