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The Paradise of murals; the Paradise of mosaics. Only no form ofart can touch this. Question those who have come and gone. Thosewhose hearts have stopped on an operating table, so that their soulsflew to this garden, and then were brought back down into articulateflesh. Nothing can touch it.
The cool, sweet air surrounded me, slowly removing, layer bylayer, the soot and filth that clung to my coat and my shirt.
Suddenly, as if waking to life again from nightmare, I reached insidemy shirt and drew out the veil. I unfolded it and held it by its twoedges.
The face burned in it, the dark eyes staring at me, the blood asbrilliantly red as before, the skin the perfect hue, the depth almostholographic, though the whole expression moved very faintly as theveil moved on the breeze. Nothing had been smeared, torn, or lost.
I felt myself gasp, and my heart speeded dangerously. The heatflooded to my own face.
The brown eyes were steady in their gaze as they had been at thatmoment, not closing for the soft finely woven fabric. I drew thewhole veil close to me, then folded it up again, almost in a panic, andshoved it tight against my skin this time, inside my shirt. I struggledto restore all the buttons to their proper holes. My shirt was all right.
My coat was filthy though intact, but all its buttons were gone, eventhe buttons that had graced the sleeves and had been no longer of anyuse and were merely decorative. I looked down at my shoes; theywere broken and tattered and barely held together anymore. Howstrange they looked, how unlike anything I had seen of late, made asthey were of such fancy leather.
Petals fell in my hair. I reached up and brushed loose a smallshower of them, pink and white, as they fell on my pants and shoes.
"Memnoch!" I said suddenly. I looked around me. Where washe? Was I here alone? Far, far away moved the procession of happysouls across the bridge. Did the gates open and close or was that anillusion?
I looked to the left, to a copse of olive trees, and saw standingbeneath it first a figure I didn't recognize, and then realized it wasMemnoch as the Ordinary Man. He stood collected, looking at me,face grim and set; then the image began to grow and spread, to sproutits huge black wings, and twisted goat legs, and cloven feet, and theangel face gleamed as if in living black granite. Memnoch, myMemnoch, the Memnoch I knew once again clothed as the demon.
I made no resistance. I didn't cover my face. I studied the detailsof his robed torso, the way the cloth came down over the hideousfur-covered legs. The cloven feet dug into the ground beneath him,but his hands and arms were his own beautiful hands and arms. Hishair was the flowing mane, only jet black. And in all the Garden hewas the only pure absence of color, opaque, or at least visible to me,seemingly solid.
"The argument is simple," he said. "Do you have any trouble nowunderstanding it?"His black wings came in close, hugging the body, lower tipscurved forward, near his feet, so that they did not scrape the ground.
He walked towards me, a horrid animalian advance carrying theoverwhelmingly perfect torso and head, a hobbled being, thrust intoa human conception of evil.
"Right you are," he said, and slowly, almost painfully, seated himself,the wings once more fading because they could never have allowedit; and there he sat, the goat god glaring at me, hair tangled,but face as serene as always, no harsher, no sweeter, no wiser or morecruel, because it was graven out of blackness instead of the shimmeringimage of flesh.
He began to talk:
"You see, what He actually did was this. He said over and over tome, 'Memnoch, everything in the universe is used ... made use of...
you understand?' And He came down, suffered, died, and rose fromthe Dead to consecrate human suffering, to enshrine it as a means toan end; the end was illumination, superiority of the soul.
"But the myth of the suffering and Dying God梬hether wespeak of Tammuz of Sumer or Dionysus of Greece, or any otherdeity the world over, whose death and dismemberment precededCreation梩his was a Human idea! An idea conceived by Humanswho could not imagine a Creation from nothing, one which did notinvolve a sacrifice. The Dying God who gives birth to Man was ayoung idea in the minds of those too primitive to conceive ofanything absolute and perfect. So He grafted himself桮od Incarnate?
upon human myths that try to explain things as if they had meaning,when perhaps they don't.""Yes.""Where was His sacrifice in making the world?" Memnoch asked.
"He was not Tiamat slain by Marduk. He is not Osiris chopped intopieces! What did He, Almighty God, give up to make the materialuniverse? I do not remember seeing anything taken from Him. Thatit came out of Him, this is true, but I do not remember Him beinglessened, or decimated, or maimed, or decreased by the act ofPhysical Creation! He was after the Creation of the planets and the stars,the same God! If anything He was increased, or seemed to be in theeyes of His angels, as they sang of new and varying aspects of HisCreation. His very nature as Creator grew and expanded in ourperceptions, as evolution took His path.
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