not in the days of
Adam and Eve, but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the refinement
of early civilization art, but because
of its
originality; with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation
of the perpendicular, plain to see and
to account for: it is no
longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band
of
incandescence that was color keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be
read; complexity is not a crime, but carry
it to the point of murkiness
and nothing is plain. Complexity,
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of
granting itself to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-
bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been--at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. "Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was torpid in its lair." In the short-legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae--we have the
classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by."
--Marianne Moore