All right.
This is the whopper.
It's about eight minutes long, I guess,
and it's called The Judgment.
And I need, I guess, to say just a couple of things about it.
There's some so-called classical references in it,
but I think those are pretty straightforward
and shouldn't create much problem.
Socrates turns up.
Orpheus, Aeneas, his father, Anchises, his girlfriend, Dido,
and the river Lethe, which he visits,
of course, in book six of the Aeneid in the underworld.
And as one goes through Lethe, depending
on who you're listening to, you either
lose all of your memories, or simply the painful ones.
I should also say that Aeneas takes
kind of a bum rap in the poem as the founder of an empire
and the master of the future.
I'm reminded of a story someplace in Ezra Pound's
Cantos, where a guy is, in a sense,
functioning as a kind of volunteer educator in a prison,
and gives one of the prisoners the Aeneid to read.
And comes in a week later and said,
well, what did you think of the hero of the Aeneid?
And the guy says, hero?
What hero?
He says, Aeneas.
He says, hero?
Aeneas, hero?
I thought he was a priest.
Anyway, so something of that sense of Aeneas,
unfair no doubt, informs part of the poem.
There's also a lot of stuff in the poem about painting,
especially modernist painting and its flattening
of the picture plane.
And the idea I had in mind, I suppose,
is that modernist paintings, giving up illusionistic depth,
is in some way analogous to a kind of severe attitude
toward the past and memory.
So the trope functions that way.
So The Judgment-- there are two epigraphs.
The first is from Coleridge, The Eolian Harp.
"It should have been impossible not to love all things
in a world so filled."
And the second is from Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
On waking, he is astonished at his lack of feeling.
It shouldn't surprise you, though, the numbness rising up
the arms from the fingertips with Socratic rigor,
the gradual sense that waking had left you
this time inside wherever the sleep had occurred.
Like a frame you had thought to climb out of,
only to bump like a moth against glass and learn,
returned into icy reserve, the imperious
integrity of the picture plane, the third dimension
dreamed in all its depth behind you,
losing itself inside this space which had no inside, for waking
had flattened the recesses.
But light streamed into them slowly,
like an uncle's well-meant gift, and the child's face
is suffused.
Then you were the subject of the composition,
while the uncle was one of the crowd,
thronging the vantage point suggested by perspective,
so that all who gazed on it stood in a single spot.
They had long since gone home, though, Magi pleased
with all they had seen, with their useful gifts
and with themselves.
And the gallery filled with the expectant hush of great art,
for light had come to stand in their place
like the blink of an eye.
It cleared away the entire expanse of hubbub
it reduced to rubble.
Cluttered uncles, camels, Magi, gifts,
the broods of brats who came to the gallery Sunday,
towed by other broods, like wakes.
The empty gallery was also like a wake.
Behind you lay all you had loved, stretched calmly
into the impermissible and figmentary space of the valley,
though you knew it not.
You loomed and filled the foreground,
since you were the foreground.
These dwindled quietly toward the upper left-hand corner
seeking solace in the vanishing point,
as if moved with slow conviction into an afterlife,
like objects slid purposely across dry ice
into the Resurrection beyond the four corners.
In the constantly failing light, it all
appeared at the verge of being quenched
above a motto in needlepoint, "Make haste
while the sun shines."
That would be before it would all
get flattened like you into the rigorous foreground,
constituting the modern age as the single-mindedness
of the most pious constituted Latium.
Pinned like Socrates to his drugged bed,
the unblinking stare looked forward, saw everything,
and didn't blink.
But like Orpheus, the mind's eye turned,
looking back into those spaces a final time.
You saw them.
The dust settling so finally on the winding road as almost
to seem real, foliage shaken slowly
and a little stiffly in the absence
of its complementary colors, the distant animals like brush
strokes quietly strayed through folds
of a calm pastoral on which you gazed like a shepherd
at the end of a very long day.
At the edge, something moved though, then,
a dot about to drop beyond the glowing, faintly vibrating
horizon line forever.
Was it a gleaner?
Would he tumble off into a void, or slowly
descend in invisible, dust-strewn valley,
sure-footed, towards softening lights of a cottage
now as he stood on the crest in his view.
You'd never know.
He hovered in his different flatness, briefly condensed
to the clarity of miniature and chiaroscuro,
a figure seeming vouchsafed from the rim of Achilles' shield.
There were others there, too, then, or near there,
for the gradually accustomed eye, small but intensely bright
in their diminished space on the far side of the river, which
worked its way up slowly from left to right.
So this was like reading book six of the Aeneid,
where those beyond Lethe strayed, illumined and free
of the hurdled, careening private trains of association
which had bound them in the foreground.
They, too, had had their faces glued to the austere parameter,
the glass beyond which moved a world attired
in its own banal and shifting exoticism.
But now they were beyond the river, changed into distance
and a strange lassitude, neither waking nor turning back
into the dreams like you who beheld them.
Above them moved their star.
The sign of their changed freedom,
it blinked far away and in regular fashion
through variegated thicknesses of arriving night.
It was like the receding tail light
on a jetliner carrying passengers to Bangkok or Sri
Lanka, or a firefly surrounded by weaving hosts
of his brethren through your neighbor's garden, suddenly
returned, wafted back blind and estranged in the familiar wind,
trailed in now with dark, like mist condensed,
and driven landward off a bay itself light years away,
but winking its rolling lights at you now.
This also called you back, a barely visible grace moving
under the blown branches.
It wasn't, strictly speaking, an arbor, but you didn't mind.
The hushed face arrived and receding back
into dimness where light lost its way after wind
in the leaves exhalation.
Your surface is waking like land rubbed over land
and floated like leaves in their bed of wind.
Then the sounds of water, as if from all around,
or from no source outside you, and later, the cool,
rising filter of daylight where birds called, and you both
woke slowly, quieted and released in the pallid dawn.
How strange that Aeneas turned from Carthage,
which was to be ruins, from Dido, illumined soon
after into the fierce specific immortality of the icon,
from Anchises, borne long on his shoulders through many lands,
and from Lethe and beyond the field of the blessed
forgetfulness, he blessedly taught himself to forget.
Like an autodidact, he tortured over the unmapped road forging
Latium, from a wall-eyed stare moved forward constantly
with nose pressed hard against the glass.
You, too, woke into a different, decisive, and numbing sense
of justice.
It would soon get to the heart of all of it.
The dreams were behind you then, as they were behind Aeneas
when he turned from them, turned forward into the space he
created as he moved.
The large but determinable monogrammed plane,
flat as a handkerchief, dry as the parched bed of Lethe,
a personalized dispensation of forgetting and remembering,
like sand traversed like a turned hourglass,
beyond which gleamed his country,
blinking with his name and the names of his race,
as if prefigured in neon.
As elsewhere in neon at night, the lights
would gleam blue, then red, then blue across your river.
They were mirrored and dazed by water
and kept saying something.
You won't say what it was, but it was one thing in red, then
another in blue.
That world is gone now, though, and no one it seems
remembers that birthplace.
You would journey forward like Aeneas toward that land
if you could and found it, but you found it long ago.
You have been waked into a space like the sleep
beyond dreams, beyond the world in which wisdom
was to know you did not know.
Here, wisdom is to know you know.