The Quest In The Flesh

Here where the forces elemental circle me, caress me and touch my city-scattered parts to a whole; Here on the mount, ’neath a blue-burnished heaven and a passionate luring sun, where the war of the wind with the leaves mocks at the strength we have hid; Here is the lesson to learn, here is the Teacher eternal, the war-lord of Space, the parent of hate and of love. Do I not hate with a love that’s intense? Is not my soul strengthened in battle? My brain is a duel of opposing forces, and the thing that I war against is more precious to me than the tickle of grass or the ease that brings degradation.

War! War!--bring me helmet and shield and the sword of the spirit; the great weaponed SELF that I seek and that forever seeks me Is shut in a tower of gold o’ergrown with weeds and the rank, poisonous fungi of outworn selves, And here, gripped in these forces elemental, I make a passionate compact with my dumb, brutish instincts To assail every live-dead thing that hinders my march to that tower of gold, o’ergrown, untended, unkenned; And there in the winds, in a fury of battle, deliver the SELF in the light of the sun-- SELF that shall live to its uttermost transfigured instinct, SELF that am God of all gods.