SPEECH FROM AN UNFINISHED PLAY: I

Solely as an experiment: stop thinking. Forget, nobly and purely, everything. Undo, graciously relax, break yourselves out of a thousand pieces, and come together. Can you feel (proudly or minutely, humbly or enormously feel) what’s coming into this world? Not anything unknown—someone, everyone, even an economizing politician with his life at the end of a leadpencil and his arse on the clouds, can predict that. Not something dreamed—no one, anyone, can guess that; even a physicking mathematician with his hand on the square root of minus one and his mind at the back of his own neck. O no; what’s arriving is as unlike meaning, or anything I and somebody and you and everybody didn’t dream and nobody knows, as a child’s breathing is like geography: form never was where, between them air is; I say it. I say it; which does not tell you. Give a woman’s eyes the right man and they’ll tell you; rhythm invents when—what’s coming is not to compare and include and discuss. What’s coming is not to tremble at, to stand up and scream about, to gasp one’s heart out for and vomit all over the new rug about. Don’t worry; don’t try to imagine, the stars know; and the trees even when bursting with buds, sometimes if bending under snow. Wave your voice, make people die, hide in the nonexistence of an atom, get the garbage concession tovarich—that makes no difference; only flowers understand. O little, O most very little civilization, pull your eyes in and kiss all your beautiful machines goodnight; yesterday was another day, which doesn’t matter—roses are roses. I swear to you by my immortal head: if sunsets are magnificent (though leaves fall, smiles pass) there shall arrive a whisper—but after the whisper, wonder; and next, death; then laughter (O, all the world will laugh—you never smelled such a world): finally, beginning; a bird beyond every bird, oceans young like mountains, universe absurdly beyond opening universe opening, freedom, function of impossibility, the philo-psycho-socialistico-losophers curl up; you die, I melt—only we may happen, suddenly who by disappearing perfectly into destiny are fatally alive. Be alive therefore; generously explode and be born, be like the sea, resemble mountains, dance; it shall not be forgiven you—open your soul as if it were a window and with a not visible cry bravely (through this immeasurable intensely how silent yesterday) fall upon the skilful thunderously and small awful unmeaning and the joy and upon the new inexcusably tomorrowing immensity of flowers.

From The New American Caravan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936).