36
My Brother,
When I saw you tonight, when in a moment of truth you came to me with a profession of love, my deepest regret was that I had none to give. You said that you had none, either, but you did give me something—you affirmed what I had always known to be the greatest manifestation of love or hate—and that is the willingness to lose the physical self. More than this loss, however, is the total commitment of the mind to an end that gives no glory, no reward, no immortality.
My brother, you will be reborn, even before you meet Him who is our last arbiter. I know this, for you—not I—are the new whom we have all been seeking. I have often wondered about the shape and color of this new man, this archangel, this man whom we have sought to be the ultimate modernizer. Now I know what he looks like. He may think of himself as a machine or as a weapon, but I know that he is much, much more than this—he is a spigot of true blood and a coil of complex nerves, and although he may regard his life with some contempt, the truth is that he gives values, far more than I can adorn mine with the hypnosis of words. He is the poet, not I.
Words—these are the jewels that I must polish. I must now try to answer as truthfully as I can, at least to myself, without having to justify myself, the question of what I have done with words—of what use is poetry, of what use is art.
I will not now try to be as obscure as Ester—whom you will probably agree with—once said I was. In fact I would like to think that poetry or art is the most luminous, the most lucid, of all forms of communication, for it goes straight not to the mind but to the heart. I would be at a loss, however, to describe how the process comes about—and because the process sometimes defines the nature and uses of art, you must forgive me if I find no real explanation for the uses of art.
What I can tell you is what it is against. It is opposed to the debasement of the human spirit. It is against anything that brutalizes, primarily because it is an affirmation of life—and anything that brutalizes denies life. How simple it would be for me to say now that art is life—not death—and that art, with all its inanities, its obscurity and its lack of purpose is, perhaps, like you, the ultimate conqueror of death.
This, I think, is what I have tried to do—to create, for myself at least, something that could make me more than what I am, coward and weakling, a man who has forsaken his past and his loved ones, a man who has lived on hate as I know my kind of hate and yet must learn how to live, if only to assure himself that he is an artist.
I think that I am, as usual, flattering myself again, thinking of myself as a creator, equipped with the finest sensibilities, and therefore special. How I would like to call myself a new man—but I know that I am not and that by your light I will never be really committed to life in such a way that I can vanquish death in the manner in which you have flung yourself completely toward its defeat. It is you then, my fearsome executioner, who is the artist, the rebel and creator, for it is you who will make beauty out of the ugliness that pervades our lives, out of the dung heap that surrounds us.
As for me, there is no single shred of doubt in my mind as to the future that I face, a future that I will have no hand in shaping in the way that you have. My mundane task is to survive—and to survive I must stay away from the turmoil of conflict and the putrefaction of despair. My sight is limited. I look around me and see the vastness of a landscape that has been charred into ruins. I see nothing but the rubble of dreams, and I am puny and weak, and I cannot do anything but quiet this helpless rage and remember that I no longer belong.
In spite of this I will try to live with my concept of honor, to accept the limits of what I can endure. If I am driven forward, inch by inch toward the grave, it is by compulsion and it is only with death that the tyrant within can be vanquished.
God, I am afraid. I would like to think that I can be brave as in the harsh physical sense I was once brave. I have seen death and laughed at its ugly face, but I have not really conquered him, for in the end he will triumph and he knows it.
But my death has happened and it has been swift and even sweet, for it has been administered with grace, with love—not hate. Good-bye, my brother.