An elderly man lived alone in a small frame house in the woods. One spring day, with the sun aloft through the branches, he went to visit his friend. He paused outside the door before setting off, looking up and around.
It was April. The days were getting noticeably longer; the air was palpably warmer. Brown leaves from the previous season still clung to the trees. Through them and around them, buds had unfolded into small, green leaves.
His friend was a young woman of thirty-five. She had had a nine year-old son. The son had passed away one month before from cancer. This was the elderly man's first visit since the funeral.
She sat on the sofa. Next to the coffee table, on the floor, there was an electronic medical device. It had a black tube, a black cord, and a red front panel with buttons under a rectangular screen. Next to a magazine rack, a stuffed animal lay on its side, one front foot and one back foot pointing up into the air. The atmosphere was a brittle hollowness carrying a heaviness that came and went. During the intermittent conversation, she made an expression that, when he was a teen-ager, he thought for sure he would have mistaken as pleading for an answer. He would have felt then that there was a satisfactory answer, out there, somewhere, one but for lack of experience or education he just didn't know. Now, even explaining that there were no words felt incomparably rote and shabby. Silence, too, had become inadequate. It was hard to breathe, but it caught you at odd moments. Not when standing or sitting there; not in the living room. Eventually, you stopped accusing yourself of not having the correct emotion just because your subconscious failed to have theatrical timing.
A few nights later, back home again, the evening brought a spring storm that grew with intensity as night came on. At nine o'clock, the power went out. At ten o'clock, the wind was blowing so hard, the elderly man began to regret not having listened to the weather forecast and boarded the windows. Somewhere off behind the house, a tree could be heard crashing to the ground in the wind and rain. An hour later, another. Through the night, at least two more. No trees significantly large enough were within range to destroy the frame house and its sole occupant, but in all the violence of the weather, if the likelihood of being crushed to death could be rationalized away, the unease of some other calamity coming about could not.
In any event, morning came without incident. The sun was out; the storm had passed by to the northeast. When the man stepped outside, the ground was covered in every direction with twigs and small branches of all different sizes. Littered throughout were the brown leaves of last year that just previously had been clinging to the branches, and scattered through these was something of a bright green color that caught his eye: The recently-unfolded buds. Detached from their trees and sprinkled on the ground along with the ancient leaves.
It was looking at the still so new, still-unmarred green leaves so discordantly scattered through the year-old raggedy brown leaves that the elderly man had an epiphany, not one of new ideas, but one of visceral understanding. Usually, in the seasons of life, brown leaves fall in autumn; some cling even as late as the following spring. But there are storms in life, and these sometimes carry away even the youngest leaves, those with the full spring and summer still ahead of them. This is how things are.
Now Neptune had Salacia to wife, who they say is the nether waters of the sea. Wherefore was Venilia also joined to him? Was it not simply through the lust of the soul desiring a greater number of demons to whom to prostitute itself, and not because this goddess was necessary to the perfection of their sacred rites? But let the interpretation of this illustrious theology be brought forward to restrain us from this censuring by rendering a satisfactory reason. Venilia, says this theology, is the wave which comes to the shore, Salacia the wave which returns into the sea. Why, then, are there two goddesses, when it is one wave which comes and returns? Certainly it is mad lust itself, which in its eagerness for many deities resembles the waves which break on the shore. For though the water which goes is not different from that which returns, still the soul which goes and returns not is defiled by two demons, whom it has taken occasion by this false pretext to invite. I ask thee, O Varro, and you who have read such works of learned men, and think ye have learned something great,—I ask you to interpret this, I do not say in a manner consistent with the eternal and unchangeable nature which alone is God, but only in a manner consistent with the doctrine concerning the soul of the world and its[Pg 286] parts, which ye think to be the true gods. It is a somewhat more tolerable thing that ye have made that part of the soul of the world which pervades the sea your god Neptune. Is the wave, then, which comes to the shore and returns to the main, two parts of the world, or two parts of the soul of the world? Who of you is so silly as to think so? Why, then, have they made to you two goddesses? The only reason seems to be, that your wise ancestors have provided, not that many gods should rule you, but that many of such demons as are delighted with those vanities and falsehoods should possess you. But why has that Salacia, according to this interpretation, lost the lower part of the sea, seeing that she was represented as subject to her husband? For in saying that she is the receding wave, ye have put her on the surface. Was she enraged at her husband for taking Venilia as a concubine, and thus drove him from the upper part of the sea?
Barely a twelvemonth afterThe seven days war that put the world to sleep,Late in the evening the strange horses came.By then we had made our covenant with silence,But in the first few days it was so stillWe listened to our breathing and were afraid.On the second dayThe radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth dayA plane plunged over us into the sea. ThereafterNothing…
No season is more fitting for Venus than Spring:In spring the earth gleams: in spring the ground’s soft,Now the grass pokes its tips through the broken soil,Now the vine bursts in buds through the swollen bark.And lovely Venus deserves the lovely season,And is joined again to her darling Mars:In Spring she tells the curving ships to sail, overHer native seas, and fear the winter’s threat no longer.
God of gods / Light of light
