Roy
Hart's excerpt from chorus VII of "The Rock" by T.S. Eliot
In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void.
Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment
towards GOD
Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed
upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement
and germination.
They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to
light and the shadow led them to darkness,
Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather
than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.
And the Spirit moved upon the face of the water.
And men who turned towards the light and were known of the light
Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions were good
And led men from light to light, to knowledge of Good and Evil.
But their light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness
As the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of the Arctic
Current;
And they came to an end, a dead end stirred with a flicker of life,
And they came to the withered ancient look of a child that has died of starvation.
Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmation of rites
with forgotten meanings
In the restless wind-whipped sand, or the hills where the wind will not let
the snow rest.
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.
Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,
A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting,
bisecting the world of'time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,
A moment in time but time was made through that moment : for without the meaning
there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.
Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of
the Word,
Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;
Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before, selfish and
purblind as ever before,
Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on
the way that was lit fcy the light;
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no
other way.
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though
we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has
never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we
to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards ?