1. |
Prologia & Part One
08:33
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1) PROLOGIA
I’ve always been a man of rhyme,
My verses light and humorous stuff,
But for the task I have this time,
That isn’t really good enough.
However, what’s inside my head
Demands some form of poetry,
And so I’ll try ‘vers libre’ instead
To write my Eschatology.
And if my style is none too sound,
I only have myself to blame,
For reading too much Whitman, Pound,
And Gerard Manley what’s-his-name.
PART ONE
Life, All Life
Has attributes
Of which we are not told.
But few believe these things.
‘Fairy-stories’, they say,
‘Mad fantasy’, they say.
And we that hold these truths,
They say,
Are sad, deluded fools;
Naive, and worse,
We threaten the consensus.
Heretics.
First Heresy:
Life, All Life,
Survives forever.
Nothing dies.
A body is dropped,
The individual survives.
Cats, kings, criminals and cockroaches,
Cheetahs, chipmunks
And Chartered Accountants,
Every bird since dinosaurs downsized
And learned to sing,
Every fish that ever flashed a fin,
Billions cubed of creepy crawlies,
Protozoa and bacteria,
All survive.
And what is more,
All plants survive,
All trees, all herbs,
All weeds and flowers;
Coconut and cactus,
Crocus and cauliflower,
The trillions of vegetable entities
In every acre of forest slash-and-burn.
All survive. Nothing dies.
And where do they survive?
Where does this vast, baggy
Biosphere survive
When fur and feathers,
Foliage, beards and teeth
Return to dust?
On another waveband of our Universe,
A different frequency
Of the Here and Now,
And thus invisible, intangible.
Second Heresy:
Life, All Life,
Holds within it
The potential to develop,
To become more itself,
A bigger, better, stronger, wiser self;
The potential to complexify,
To self-organise,
To reach its own particular
Spiritual perfection.
However primitive,
However lowly, the lifeform,
It holds, within it,
This potential.
And these Heresies
Are not the Speculation
That I promised you.
This is just the way things really are.
And if this seems impossible,
Bizarre, ridiculous, to you,
That is not my problem.
My job is to speak true,
To dance my dance.
What you make of it
Is your own concern.
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2. |
Part Two
04:03
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2) PART TWO
Now I Speculate.
Let us say that it began
The way we are told it began;
The Singularity,
The inflating Zero Point,
The cataclysm of creation.
And then, in order,
The numberless vortices of cosmic fire,
The condensing, the solidifying,
The cooling,
The countless millennia of rain,
The warm seas,
The rich chemical soup.
And then,
Let us say that it began
The way we are told it began:
The random, undirected meeting,
In one small eddy,
Beneath the bubbling broth,
Of rare amino acids.
And then
The lucky lightning-strike,
The million-to-one Promethean shot,
The superheat, the fusing,
The mutating strings of molecules.
And so it happens:
It’s alive,
The cell, the tiny fragile form,
The amoebic blob,
Living, dividing, inexorably spreading.
Here in the Proterozoic,
The game has begun.
Those spawning blobs,
‘Cell One’ and all her billion children,
Living and dying,
Living and dying,
But not exactly dying,
As their tiny, inner sparks
Move across the not-so-Great Divide,
In a glowing cloud of living Energy,
Here, and yet not-here,
Close, and yet out-of-sight.
Tiny blob souls,
And thus inchoate, amorphous, disorganised,
But developing,
By infinitesimal degrees,
Their potential
To become more themselves,
To complexify, to self-organise,
To reach their own particular
Spiritual perfection.
(And a perfected Protozoan,
Must be something to see.)
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3. |
Part Three
05:53
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3) PART THREE
Let us agree that Evolution
Happens the way
We are told it happens.
There is no need for us
To pick a fight with Darwin.
But Intelligences older than our own
Have made it clear
That every step along
That steep and rocky path
Is preceded and precipitated
By a nudge,
A spiritual, psychic nudge
That comes from
This Universe Next Door.
For almost three thousand
Million years,
Or eighty-five percent of all the time
That has elapsed since Life began,
Our Protozoan blobs
Have been the only game in town,
Until the Universe Next Door
Finally achieves sufficient consciousness
To reach down,
To reach though,
And nudge;
To give the tiny impulse
That precipitates
A small and successful mutation.
And slowly,
Oh, so slowly,
The Dance of Evolution
Begins its stately measure.
The Evolution Two-Step,
Building in tempo,
As ever-more sophisticated
Beasts and plants,
And critters of all sorts,
Strut their stuff
For one short moment
On the dance floor,
And then lie down to die.
But not exactly die,
Just move,
With individuality
And intelligence intact,
To join the game
In the Universe Next Door.
Increasingly sophisticated,
Increasingly intelligent,
This hypernet of souls complexifies,
Self-organises,
Increasingly achieves perfection.
It is conscious,
It is aware of being aware.
It has purpose, and power,
And it is active in support of life.
It finds that it can reach down,
Reach through,
And help the Dance along,
Which reaches its full tempo now,
Pulsating incessantly for eons
Down the time-line.
And we can fast-forward too,
Till monkeys become monkey-men,
And monkey-men become like us.
And every human being
That ever lived and died
Adds their intelligence and memories,
The Light and the Dark
Of individual personality,
To this Hypernet,
To this Universe Next Door.
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4. |
Part Four
05:10
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4) PART FOUR
How is it now,
The Spirit Universe?
This phenomenon
Born out of a fecund planet?
Awesome.
A universe of Voices,
A universe of individuals,
Some close, some far,
Some loud, some soft,
Some good, some not-so-good,
We hear them in our Inner Ear.
A universe of Voices,
A universe of Influences,
Some strong, some weak,
Some good, some not-so-good,
We feel them in our Inner Heart.
And closer to the central radiance
There shine out
Vast Intelligences,
Benevolent Powers,
Limitless reservoirs of Grace,
Extravagances of Blessings,
Their Hands thrust down,
Thrust through,
To mould, to inspire, to heal.
Miracles.
And beyond them,
The white-hot core
Of Perfected Being,
The Great Sun
That powers discarnate
And incarnate alike.
What can we call this Light,
This giant, perfect Power,
Except ‘God’?
Our planet has given birth to God.
Deus Natus Est
Jubilate!
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5. |
Part Five
04:26
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5) PART FIVE
I speculate further.
How many galaxies are there?
Numberless.
How many stars in each galaxy?
Numberless.
And, spun about those stars,
How many planets
That have undergone,
As C. S. Lewis says,
‘The sweet humiliations
Of organic life’?
Thousands? Millions?
Numberless.
And for each and every living sphere,
However strange its lifeforms,
A parallel Universe of Spirit
Will have grown.
And perhaps each living planet
Has generated its own God.
And perhaps
Worlds older than our own
Have Gods greater than our own.
Dei Nati Sunt
Dei Nati Sunt
Jubilate!
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JUDGE SMITH Glastonbury, UK
Judge Smith co-founded the band Van der Graaf Generator in 1967 with Peter Hammill, & has since been involved in many music projects as writer, composer or performer. He has written stage musicals, classical & rock libretti, songs for television & a book on Life after Death; directed a prize-winning short film, & released fourteen CDs & two DVDs. He was born in 1948 & lives near Glastonbury, UK. ... more
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