It started on the morning of the day of the Moon. Perhaps that was the morning, the one that gave all such days their meaning. A small thing it might seem: to split the one half from the other. One had such fascination with the glittering break and it was a great and terrible purpose. I should have feared the thing. On the one side all tremulous, gasping, gaping open wound and, on the other, such cold self-preserving indifference. Teeth biting down and into that which nourished but not this time. No, now it rotted, twisted, divided.
It is still more than a little surprising that it happened. No matter how these prying talons grasped, no matter how narrowly the edge was honed, it had not seemed probable or even possible to cleave the wholeness of a thing. Indeed, at first even the word for it had to do double duty. To cleave that which cleaved. To cleaver with huge weight and unthinkable sharpness muscle and bone, joint and sinew, flesh from flesh.
The next time it was easier. This joint was looser, lighter. That first had been flesh and flesh and though the cleaving, clever double-meaning, had been more mystic than physical, more spirit and less material and this was physical and not mystical, the sharp cleaver into brain-pan, the bite of flaked stone and fire-hard ebon-wood. But mystic still, for that swinging arm, that muscular strike, the driving of edge into living flesh full of warm blood, beating heat, stringing nerve and muscle and tension had been preceded by such diverging efforts as took long sun’s returns to divide this blood from blood: the flowing course of things diverted to separate channels. Difference did it. The sameness of a thing seemed to hold it together and the fruit and the animal, the dark and the light, the strong and the weak divided.
After that it was almost too easy. Hard stone crushing, hard words too. Each understood the difference of each and each was next to each and even friction was sharp enough, grinding at every union. One did not have to hone an edge but just to sprinkle grist between. Terrible striving seemed the less striving because so ready and easy to hand but who could know to fear the prosperity of one’s work? To have found the tense edge and cut and cut and cut. Who knew to fear the fitness of destruction?
There was a change. And what to think of change? Was my enemy now my ally? Had my labor been finally brought to completion? The very sky tore in half and the earth too. Fountains of the deep pouring forth their force and rending the very shape of all the earth. I felt the delirious joy of accomplished purpose, the mountain top experience, the wholeness of triumph. And then, oh then, I fell fast from that pinnacle into turmoil. For if, if this was to be, if the world were rent in two, in three, in a thousand, and the enemy agreed, was not my very meaning violated? To be united in purpose with another was to be destroyed by the poison of paradox. I could not bear it. I could not think it, although I could see it and I could know it real. Perhaps the pain of the whole had shattered the enemy too but then we would have fellow-feeling and that was acid on skin. That was rancid meat in my guts.
The pressure of that moment was nearly my end. Sick and feeling old with effort, old with dread and horror of re-union, though now I see how youthful even that feeling is. To feel old is to be young and not know the true lengths of time. For now I am old even as he can count it and that dread is a distant memory of pleasure to this parched dust of eternity beyond Saturn’s grasp.
I found to my despair but not to my rest, reduced as flesh was, it still could unite and thus could be divided. That, rent as earth was, the very tears revealed the deeper unity. There was now more to do. Cleaving the cleaving, it seems, was not enough, the striking blow must go all the way through and out into the beyond and, thick places or thin, all the way through was farther than I knew to reach. No half-measures now.
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Unite where divided and divide where united. If the enemy could play at paradox, then paradox would have to be divided to. Take it and crack it in half, in pieces, in splintered racing away, in unreality. A separate people then? Make them unite and not separate. He will cut them off and they will be divided then and separate uniting will break the old alliance and shattered individuals will go far and away and hate and spill the blood of infants and daughters and not goats and doves. Divide the dove and unite the gods you say? They will divide over the dove and in it, blood spilling spattering twisting worship divided. Oh! I could play at this, could take all the rule, all the hope, all the ritual, and take the sameness and the common and the shared and make it all strife and trouble and war.
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Whirling, busy, rushing, who would have thought that it would end like this? I have done it and it is done and yet undone and it burns and divides me from myself which I want and having what I want I hate it and I am twisted up in all the tension pulling me apart and yet binding me closer and harder and more myself. I cut and I cut, and the language divided, and the land divided, and the father and the son: brother against brother. I carved child from mother, from mother’s own womb, and I split minds and atoms and, oh enemy, oh damn me, I split the very bride in two in ten in ten thousand and the dust is chopped fine and it is all I can breathe and it chokes my lungs. There is no breath. And as I went and as I go I can see it all and it is unbearable. Every cut revealed that thing, that light, that loathsome word, that fundamental, that unity that will not separate. You shatter it and it runs together. Mercury shaken. You make that cleaving and it cleaves. Mind and spirit and matter and gross flesh and divinity and you cut that out on the crux and there it is again just three days later stitching weaving fighting back to one and three and one and trailing all that harrowed hell in its wake. You chop and pull and tear and it settles and from it comes some new unheard of thing and the ivy wraps and chokes and feeds and there is some other gross and living thing that takes all my work into itself and from it makes new, makes whole, makes human divine and divine human. And how? How can it continue? How this note and that one and they match but they don’t match and the sound is hard and together as one and now it’s all over. The battle. Even me. I cannot divide and I cannot be whole and it’s actually funny now but I always hated laughter.
THE END