Yocto Angstrom
The Livery
June 8, 2008
My parents were both academicians. Not academicians in the traditional sense, I guess. My father was a student of Charles Finney. My mother, a student of the hymns of John Wesley. So it's pretty evident how narrow of a focus their epistemological searches were. I still consider Finney my first teacher outside of my parents. I guess I should give a little background.
Finney was a nineteenth century theologian focusing on what he called moral government theology. Moral government theology essentially postulates that man is able to perfectly adhere to the commandments of God, but that the fall of man hindered that possibility. Finney said that Christ's death as atonement for sin was a form of public justice rather than retribution for actions, and due to this satisfaction of public justice, atonement was attainable. He started reading portions of this to me when I was about six years old. I think he was trying to show me in some way that there were not more things in this world that were dreamt of in his philosophy.
He disagreed with Finney's status as a Calvinist, albeit a tacit Calvinist. Due to our theological conversations and disagreements, I believe I developed a grosser fascination with the world than if I would have seen all of it at once. In this, I've learned to use my incredibly overbearing upbringing as something that's constructive and positive. It's created a dichotomy in my mind of things I was taught when I was young which dwelt within a specific worldview, and everything else.
On my tenth birthday, I remember my father and mother showing me a video called Powers of Ten. It's a film by Charles and Ray Eames which illustrates the relative size of both the universe and a single molecule. The film was made on October 10, 1977 in Chicago, and it begins on a white and red-striped picnic blanket. The beginning scene is a one meter view of the blanket., and every ten seconds, the perspective is ten times as wide. I remember watching the highways near Soldier's Field become invisible within ten seconds. After that, it all became a blur. I remember Lake Michigan turning into the entire Earth in just a few seconds. The Earth becomes visible and invisible in a few more and the moon's orbit can be seen. Then the orbital paths of the planets at 10^11 meters. The solar system itself shrinks at 10^14. A light year at 10^16, and the background stars began to converge at 10^17. I was out of the galaxy at 10^20, and galaxy clusters appeared before emptiness.
I was terrified, but then the powers of ten decreased every 2 seconds on the way back to Earth, and I saw inside the man's hand on his stomach while he lied on that same blanket, a white and red-striped blanket. And then the steps became smaller and smaller every ten seconds. At 10^-2, the surface of the hand is approached. Afterwards, the camera enters the skin to zoom in on pixelized blood vessels. Then the wall of the nucleus. Then DNA, the double helix that I had seen before at 10^-7. Then three hydrogen atoms bonded to a carbon atom. At 10^-10 the camera was viewing one angstrom. And then .1 angstroms, where we entered what the movie called "the vast inner space." Then a single proton filled the screen while the narrator speculated about quarks at 10^-16. The video covered only 40 powers of ten.
I was blown away by the film and spent the rest of the day in my room viewing it from space and zooming in on the molecules inside my chair, desk, or the plush space shuttle on my wall. My parents came in to caution me about the movie, telling me that the only proper way to view it and the universe was with the understanding that the Lord Jesus had created it all. They cautioned me that Charles and Ray Eames were probably evolutionists since they worked with IBM, and in my parents' book, that was the ultimate insult. They believed that the entire duty of humanity on Earth was the glorification of the Judeo-Christian God, and anyone who did not fulfill this divine law was misunderstanding their raison d'etre.
Because of this, when my parents cautiously let me start hanging out with my peers, I immediately had problems relating to them. Believe it or not, there aren't a lot of discussions about theological treatises happening around most people's houses. Kids wanted to talk about sports or cartoons or each other, not the inherent ethical obligations of Antinomianism or God's perfect foreknowledge of future contingencies.
Believe it or not, my fall from the Christian faith actually came from reading a theological encyclopedia to try to further understand these abstrusions. In doing so, I hoped I could gain a better understanding of my father, but when I saw the inherent complexity and contradictions within the encyclopedia, I began to have doubts about the way I was being raised. For instance, if all knowledge is divinely inspired and all of Christendom believes in the same God, how could these sects develop and turn against each other? Shouldn't there at least be some standard of theological consistency, if Christians truly believed all knowledge was divinely bestowed?
But it wasn't just the contradictions and hypocrisy in terms of theology. On some level, I think that I would have been more understanding had these discrepancies resided in the realm of the ideal rather than the actual, but the behavior of those I saw around me in the church continually contradicted their teachings. This happened even as they were preaching. I remember the pastor at one of the many churches my parents attended in between schisms delivering a sermon about pride with the most egocentric look in his eyes imaginable.
In these moments of doubt, I would return to the Bible just as I was instructed to. Instead of divine revelatory prophecies flowing out of my mouth, I was greeted with even more doubt. Even within chapters, my young mind would be torn apart by inconsistencies within the text, even basic mathematical inconsistencies. In the book of 2nd Chronicles, Chapter 4, Verse 2, the building of the temple is described. Remember, this is the Bible. "Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."
I tried drawing out this sphere because a boy in Sunday school had asked about it the week before. The teacher, Mrs. Bloss, had told him that she didn't have the answer, but that he should ask God, and if God didn't tell him now, he would be able to find out when he got to Heaven. When the boy asked a follow-up question, the teacher I grabbed a pencil and tried it for myself after praying for God to instruct me to be diligent about my mathematics in the universe he had created for us. You can try it with young me if you get a piece of paper and something to write with.
Forget about the cubit for a second, other than remembering that it's basically the length of a forearm. Draw a circle and then make it 3-D, just like you used to in Algebra class. Mark the diameter of the base as 10. Mark the height as 5. Now, I want you to measure the circumference of the base. The formula is pi times the diameter of the circle.
What did you get? I got something close to 31.4159265. Not exact, but a pretty good approximation. Somehow, the people measuring this sphere in 2nd Chronicles managed to come up with 30. Normally, I would write this off as an early adoption of the New Math and be done with it. But there's a problem. We're talking about an enormous discrepancy in terms of basic arithmetic. This is a mis-measurement of over 2 feet. Why would it be necessary to catalog these figures, especially figures of something as small as a molten sea, if accuracy was not a goal?
This inaccuracy was an even more poignant finding based on the time I figured it out, only a few days after my viewing of Powers of Ten. In considering the incredible molecular structure of the universe, I knew it was time to have a discussion with my father. I was sure he would be able to clear up my obvious misunderstanding about the topic.
I went into the room one night after my father had returned home from a business trip to ask about what I found. The answer that he gave me was that the Hebrew people at the time were not nearly mathematically advanced enough to be able to perform these precise scientific calculations, and he also reinforced that fact that basic Greek geometrical texts had not been published at the time. Even if they had, he said, the Hebrews would not have had access to such texts.
The problem was that this answer wasn't satisfactory to me. My father constantly spoke of the concept of Biblical inerrancy, that the Bible as we knew it in English was the verbal plenary inspiration of God. Because of this, God wasn't just trying to give his writers an idea of what to put down on the scroll; this was the Logos dictating the Logos. What I couldn't understand was how God could create something as small as a molecule and have Hebrews give the incorrect dimensions for the measurement of a circle in the structure built for worshiping Him. I remember going into a verbal frenzy trying to explain this, and the words were gushing out of my mouth faster than I could try to prevent them from coming out.
What I saw in my father at that moment was something I had only seen before when he had backed his car into a dumpster or when he had stubbed his toe on the dining room table. But this time, it was being directed at me. Muscles in his physiognomy bulged absurdly while adrenaline replaced the blood in his veins. His authority as the house patriarch was being threatened, and some prehistoric urge took control over his usually collected temperament. His finger pointed at me, and he bit his lip while I sat through the second of dreadful silence before what I knew was coming. Now, as I think back on that day, I want to tell him there was no mastodon hunt scheduled that day, to tell his wild animus that he and his people had already killed them all. Instead, I sat Jesusquiet, learning how he thought I should be a man. It was the beginning of our theological discussions.
My father railed on me about the dangers of hellfire and the inherent rebellion involved in questioning the veracity of scripture. He forbid me from the video that I had loved so much and assigned me pages of scriptures to copy, saying that I should learn to copy them just as monks in years past had. My father had ceased to be Jesus. At that moment, he became Yahweh. As I continued to question and search through my spiritual path, he became crueler and crueler, progressively pushing his rigidity and legalism on me.
When I think of him, I still think of the bust of Finney that sat on our family piano. There's a famous picture of Finney with his visage facing right, his eyes full of some Godly or ungodly fire, looking like Moses coming back from Mt. Sinai with the tablets. That gaze is actually what I saw in my father on that first day, the first day I really deigned to separate myself from the path he had carefully paved for me. Forced conformity, however, inherently breeds non-conformity. At my father's request, I continued studying the Bible but used the theological encyclopedia as a framework for study. I would alternate between the texts in order to properly cross-reference passages.
The most interesting entries that I found during these few days shed a light on Christendom and the true nature of Christianity for me. I read about three different hermeneutic methods which were described as heretical in the encyclopedia but made more sense to me than anything I had been taught in terms of religion. The encyclopedia described the ancient Gnostic idea that there were three types of Christians.
The first are Hylic Christians, also called Choic or Sarkic. Hylic Christians focus only on the material world, what is placed before them, without further examination into the nature of matter. They are driven by Heimarene, the force of destiny controlled by stars. When Hylic Christians read scripture, they interpret in a straightforward yet base way which counts each word as some literal, physical truth.
The second are Psychic Christians. These Christians are driven by the understanding of the intellect. They have realized by examination that the physical world is important because it reflects human intellect. Their quest is intellectual understanding of God through comprehension of the physical and mental spheres. However, they are still so drawn to the intellect that they fail to grasp the ultimate truth of Christianity, which is not an purely mental understanding of truth but something far greater.
The last are Pneumatic Christians, the highest echelon of interpreters and prophets in the tiered system. Pneumatic Christians identify with the spirit, soul, anima, the pneuma which governs both the physical and intellectual universes. A true understanding of the pneuma is the spark which brings a body back to a consciousness of the God-spirit which is awakened by gnosis.
The next Sunday, I remember sitting in my room in a white robe and refusing to get up for church. I claimed that my physical or intellectual presence inside the church was unnecessary and in fact took away from my understanding of the pneuma. I saw the animus in my father again rather than the anima that I had dutifully begun seeking. My father angrily diagnosed it as a case of Jerusalem Syndrome outside of Jerusalem and began pulling me out of the bed, shouting out that the church was the house of God, and if I truly thought I had ascended to the greatest level of spirituality, I should recite the 7 churches of Asia Minor from the book of Revelation and cause the Apocalypse through prayer. As he was pulling me, my white robe being torn at by his rough hands, I felt like I was about to be crucified by him. I could imagine him breaking apart the desk in my room and picking up the planks and banging them together with hammer and nail, like I had seen him do when he worked on the house. I could still remember the clanging and the look of hatred for the world on his face when he hit his thumb with the nail as I watched, playing my board game in the family room next to the new extension. I was fearful for my life but knew that my spirit would ascend. I believed for years that had my mother not entered the room at that moment, I would have been nailed to a cross and hung, that sacrificial Sunday on the floor.
My mother was a student of John Wesley, and if you've heard basically any music I've ever made, you can see that neither she nor John Wesley were big influences in my life.
First time on ecstasy. At first, sensations were heightened, and I thought it was just a nice feeling. Then, the delusions began. Ecstasy pills are rarely pure mollies, MDMA only. Oftentimes, they're cut with meth, ephedrine, or psychedelics. When the delusions started coming on, I became obsessed with the necessity of purifying my body and everything around me, beginning with the front door's imperfection, then thinking about picking up cigarettes and cleaning the gutters. After getting home, I took the longest shower of my life and then lied down with my girlfriend. I could feel the drugs beginning to take effect as I saw the Internet router in the room blinking along with our breathing. I had been paranoid about being watched the entire day, but at that point, it was obvious that the method of surveillance was much more simple than tracking IP addresses or anything else. It was putting a telescreen in the room which detected all motion, all thought, all sensation.
The strange part is that although I was doing illegal drugs, I wasn't scared. Suddenly I understood that if people were able to watch everything that I was going through, they would somehow be able to understand my plight based on my influences and the sincerity that I felt. I began playacting into the router as my girlfriend didn't know what was going on. Although I wasn't paying attention at this point having almost completely lost control of my faculties, she must have been horrified at what was going on.
When I touched her, I felt such a closeness with her that I thought I had impregnated her through osmosis, creating not a virgin birth but a birth entirely without fertilization. Based on the method of impregnation, the only possibility in my mind at that moment was that I had created the Christ child inside of her. But as I saw her fail to react, I realized that we were both nurturing the child somehow with both of our bodies. After a while, she just told me to lie down and be comfortable. She was just taking care of me and trying to get me through what was obviously a difficult experience, but the way she was doing it made me think that this pregnancy had been transferred to me. As this was happening, whatever psychedelics were in the two pills that I took were really beginning to take effect. I was creating intricate geometric universes inside my head, creating one and watching it spiral into the next seamlessly. I remember spreading my legs wide as she told me to just breathe, and at that point, I honestly believed that I was giving birth to another human, to a child that would replace me as the creator of these universes as Jesus was glorified to the throne of God.
The sensations rolling through my arms and head made me think that the birth canal for this new Messiah was where I thought my heart was when I was young, in the center of my chest cavity. It had always made more sense that the heart was there to me, in that place where my feelings seemed to rise from as a child. I could never feel the heartbeat on the left side of my body; it always seemed to beat through that chest cavity, and I held my new revelation close to me. Suddenly, the universe creation process became easier and easier, and as my girlfriend lay sleeping next to me after giving me the simple instruction to smile, I began thinking that we had a symbiotic life relationship. Since our breathing was synchronized, it felt like the blood was running from my body to hers and from hers back to mine. She had become my child, and I had become her child.
Meanwhile, the patterns I was creating in my mind's eye were a way of bestowing the divine revelation of Krishna consciousness to the rest of the world. After taking the pills, I had become obsessed with the concepts of structuralism and post-structuralism, the system of building an enormous superstructure with which to encapsulate human knowledge and then the tearing down of that structure, using the bricks left in the rubble to reconstruct a more beautiful building. The names of De Saussure and Derrida were on my mind constantly, and they warred back and forth with each other. Suddenly, I felt the pull of the anxiety of influence capture me. The sudden realization that I had taken the position of creator meant that my vision of a new world had to supersede not only human understanding but divine understanding. Before I could reconstruct a new structure as a creator, my first duty was to rip away the philosophies of great thinkers and gods present and past. Yahweh was easy to destroy with a simple flaw, and Jesus was more difficult. In fact, I felt my own test in the desert began when I felt Satan approach, trying to trick me out of newly found godhood. I was able to easily rebuke him by realizing that my struggle was not a struggle at all, because I knew the final outcome, which was ultimately victory. One of the easy ways to get rid of Jesus is the fact that he didn't begin his ministry until age 30, when he should have begun it much sooner. Satan was a more difficult challenge. There is a flaw immediately present in that. And as I knocked God off of the mountain that he stood on, I felt the other humans calling out to the cosmos that they deserved the title of God more than I did. Foolishly, I succumbed to the grandeur of my own ego and began battles against the greatest minds throughout centuries, trying to find one flaw in their philosophies that would automatically restrict them from the godhood that was necessary. And as I fought those battles over what must have been only a few minutes, I battled with myself over whether I was worthy of being the sole god of the universe. The idea sounds preposterous now, but with the galaxies I created in my mind, I was in a dream which I felt would last eternally. I willed hundreds of years to go by with myself as the ruling patriarch feeling voices all around me proclaim their godhood loudly. This godhood was something that I wanted to share, but I was overwhelmingly concerned that a negative force would break up my positive creation.
My trials were not over. I began trying to create symbols, utopias where humans would automatically understand and accept the god nature as something to willingly obey without questioning. I wanted to create Eden without the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but there was no way to restrict the evil I was fighting. Furthermore, I did not know how to erase my own sinful history. I knew that my new state of divinity was pure, but I was constantly dealing with the difficulty of those searchers, those rebellious searchers, trying to find flaws in my past life so they could point out that I would no longer be god. At this point, the demiurge would reign, and I would lose my godhood. I tried in constant sign parables to give these demiurgical forces assurances that my motives were pure. I tried the signs A and 1, the cross before I realized the inherent ridiculousness of it, a simple circle. I tried turning the entire world into beautiful psychedelic waves before realizing that maybe people didn't want to be psychedelic waves, and there would be a person who believed that a waveless world was the most beautiful place of all. Over and over again, I was faced with the necessity of creating a utopia and the overall impossibility of doing it. In this fantasy, almost everyone would be perfectly satisfied, but there was also one Luciferian character who would rise up to fight my own egotistically ideal world. Each symbol was knocked down. I tried Ouroboros, a beautiful sanctuary, but again I realized what I had realized so many years ago with my father. Attempting to prescribe a perfect universe full of conformity for humans only creates the desire for non-conformity, a beautiful rebellion which would offer the world another possibility. Automatically, I realized, there would be someone always willing to do this to create their new followers, a beautiful Light-bearer trying to drag my children away from me, and that terrified me. For a while, I contemplated the possibility of a universal godhood where everyone had unlimited powers, but I immediately realized this was impossible and desirable simultaneously. Of course, this equanimity and egalitarian attitude was the only just one, but in this justice, it also created the eternal possibility of someone striving against beautiful sincerity for their own specious and self-gratifying purposes.
I realized again that time was on my side, and as long as I could make time pass, I could continue on like this until infinity. I knew there would be temptation the next day, the necessity of being back in my human body and being forced to go to work, but at that point my human body was entirely trivial and only a form of the samsara I had understood Buddha to fall prety to earlier that night. After my attempted reconstruction of society, I felt those voices rebelling against me, saying that my symbol was utterly meaningless without the opposite of the symbol which they represented. There would be no knowledge of the significance of the signifier if there was no ultimate signified that it pointed to. I was trying to point each signifier at the ultimate Signified, the divine presence yearning for perfection and positive change. However, the signifiers that I was creating were flawed because they could always be viewed in a different way. Each symbol was subject to the understanding of the viewer of the symbol, and if they misinterpreted the ultimate meaning of what I was trying to portray, my task was fruitless.
While I was in Romania, Marie DuPrey invited me over for tea. For anyone who has heard of Marie, this is an incredible honor. Ms. DuPrey is a tea aficionada of the highest caliber, and seeing the attention of detail that she pays to her art, I knew this would be an incredible experience. Not only did I have the enviable experience of being in her company for the afternoon, but I was going to be drinking tea with her.
I had met Marie years before volunteering at a few Lower East Side galleries and performance spaces before they all closed down. She is an incredibly vibrant spirit, and other people I worked with at the gallery said that they felt even looking at her was somehow defiling her. Somehow Marie remains completely down to earth but retains a sort of regal air with the mischievousness of a princess who yearns to leave the castle. There is the renewing of spring and warmth of summer in her, but she carries a simultaneous consciousness of the solemnity and austerity of autumn and winter. Although I consciously try not to idealize her, I see her as Proserpine, literary and evergreen, but instead of being kidnapped by Hades from Demeter's side in the garden with the nymph Sirens, she willingly goes to investigate the underworld. Marie is not a helpless Proserpine; she is Proserpine in willful control of her destiny despite a world which abides by fatalism.
The day I met her in Romania, I had taken a car to get to her country villa. Just like Proserpine when snatched from the garden, Marie was picking flowers to flavor the tea we would have later. I didn't know what to do when I saw her. I wanted to explode like a child's bottle rocket in excitement and still portray myself as world-wise, demure, and stalwart. Instead I ran to her and kissed her on the cheek and forehead. Marie's hair whirled around while the world twirled in my head, and she responded like a fledgling flower being kissed. Like the employees in that performance space, I feel guilty just writing about her, sullying the flower petals with my breath, but these words will remain on this page.
Marie was celebrating the success of her latest installation, an enormous canvas with novel pages printed on every wall, entire rooms with novel wallpaper, handwritten poems, and text – beautiful text. Due to a conflicting music exhibition tour, I was not able to make it to the initial gallery opening, but I had envisioned it already in my head based on what I had heard, sylvan and chrysanthemum pages melding into each other on old brick walls with cobwebs carefully cleared out and relocated.
The first question she asked me: "What does the nanometer read?" It was like a Zen koan out of her mouth.
Marie asked me the same question a few years ago when we had shared a rainy afternoon under a green awning. We had an entire conversation isolated only on that question. My last name, Angstrom, is outmoded as a scientific measurement. Very few people in the scientific world still use the word, preferring to measure in nanometers, which are equivalent to one millionth of a millimeter. One nanometer equals ten Angstrom. When we had the original conversation, she told me that I was smaller than the nanometer, but that meant that in and of myself, I encompassed the nanometer. The nanometer reads ten Angstrom.
She was also asking how far I've traveled since she last asked. We had talked about building a device to measure steps taken in incredibly small measurements years ago, and we jokingly argued about whether the device should measure in nanometers or Angstrom. She wanted to call it a nanometer, like a speedometer. How many nanometers had it been since I saw Marie?
The device was also supposed to learn, constantly developing an artificial intelligence of its own in order to track the precise measurements necessary for it. Marie wanted to make the nanometer read a book as the first assignment to ensure that the device was tracking the measurements properly. Along with being a tea aficionada, Marie is fanatical about typography. She knows precise distances between pixels in fonts not only in pixels but in picas, even conical optical measurements. That was going to be our first experiment, but between the two of us, we could never decide on the best book for the device to begin reading. I proposed Finnegans Wake if only for the first appearance of the word "quark," but Marie protested and thought it should be something simpler and brought up the idea of a children's book to easily track the distances through large fonts.
The only answer I could think of was Ad Infinitum. Right there, she started crying. I had no idea what to do or why it had been so long since I had seen this woman. She asked me if we could write Ad Infinitum together to make sure all the pages turned out right. I didn't say anything. I just nodded and nodded.
After a few smooth papyrus moments standing there, Marie brought me inside the villa, and every corner was decorated exquisitely. There were silk scarves on top of chairs, closets full of old newspapers, golden chardonnay bottles on the kitchen counter, and photographs of her exhibits all around. Those photographs of the exhibits turned her house itself into a living exhibit of her art inside her art inside her art. There was a picture she had taken of the St. Augustine sun next to one of her Walpurgisnacht series paintings. Heaven standing next to Hell, and this woman could see the beauty in both but was irrevocably a member of the golden cherubim. I had subconsciously left my new recorder on, and it was designed to record everything all the time. I locked the tape away to avoid hearing it. An extravagance: I mustered up enough money from patrons to open a Swiss bank account and deposited the tape in a vault in Geneva. I made Marie lock it up with a series of passwords and codes. The codes were to be series of secret coded colors, geometric shapes, and bizarre geographical locations impossible to guess. I didn't want to hear it, because her racy logic and ripped off layers would make the river networks in my mind ring until I couldn't turn it off. My brain would resort to an endless loop of the moment until I became mute, deaf, blind, lame, and unable to taste the world but through those precious seconds. When you have finally captured a moment that you would gladly live over and over until the hour of your death, you have reached serenity for a fleeting moment, and the nature of its fleet feet is a beautiful turmoil. That afternoon is a sacrament, either the first or last. Even describing the moments here is a temptation to remain within them, pulled under by sweet quicksand.
At the table, there was one cup, what looked like a grail decorated ornately yet simplistically. One rose on the table. Marie had me sit down and chanted "Om mani padme hum." The bag was encrusted with what Marie said were 700 diamonds, and the bag held a precious condensed kilogram of a Chinese green tea called Tieguanyin. Marie patiently explained that the tea is named after the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, or Guan Yin. The name is translated as "Iron Goddess of Mercy," and there are two legends surrounding the tea's origin. The most beautiful, and the one I believe, is the Wei legend.
The legend tells of a farmer named Wei who would pass by a decaying temple daily while walking to his tea fields. As a poor farmer, Wei yearned to repair the temple more and more as he watched entropy take its effect. One day, although he could not afford the materials necessary for a full repair, Wei went into the temple to sweep it with his broom. Along with the broom, he brought incense and lit an offering to the bodhisattva.
Every two weeks, he would return to clean the temple again and light incense in reverence to Guan Yin until she appeared in a feat of oneiromancy. She told Wei about a treasure in the cave hidden behind her temple. Wei was allowed to take the treasure on the condition that he shared it with others. Wei ventured to the cave after awakening from his dream and found a singular tea shoot. He gave the tea to his closest neighbors and began selling the tea under the name Guan Yin. Wei and his neighbors prospered due to their reverence to the bodhisattva, and Wei led the effort to reconstruct the once beautiful temple.
Marie offered me this sacrament, this purest diamond-encrusted bag, to someone as unworthy as me. She bid me take the first sip.
Marie, rosy-fingered dawn, the fleur:
"Upon the tangled crimson sheets
and frame that's lined with quicksilver,
when the jutting meets the crease,
the endless message might still stir.
And if they reach that hallowed gate,
their rapturous mystery will create
the gift which all eyes long to see:
the rose which blooms eternally."