GOBI DESERT AND
ROBERT FROST
In placating the spirits, there's not much room for mistake :
you take what's given and respond in like manner - but
you'd better be right. If not, remember, they can turn rivers
to blood, make cold water boil, melt iron and steel on a whim.
Such fractured responses can really break one's spirit, and we,
as a people, will bear the brunt of some malicious frenzy.
Crazy Gods are like that : remember that one about a
Coke bottle falling out of the sky?
-
Robert Frost wrote - citing St. Mark correctly - that
he'd hidden his broken drinking goblet at the instep of
the old cedar tree on the waterside - like the Grail,
holy and sacrosanct and under a spell 'so the wrong
ones can't find it, so can't get saved, as St. Mark
says they mustn't.' I went and looked that up, after
I read it, as if to find out what he meant. The world
is vast arrayed against our possibilities; yes, I said that.
-
What it all means, arid, like a desert, is that the world is a
certain and a strange place - an interpretive assumption
we make, and all take part in. Yet, it is not there, is a
mere illusion we forestall from being by imagining.
Precluding argument, we arrange our own solutions.
And again - as the Gospels put it, Mark - it is only
an elect who will be saved; the wrong ones will never
get it (and mustn't) and perdition will serve them well.
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