"I want you," said Angus Og, "because the world has forgotten me. In all
my nation there is no remembrance of me. I, wandering on the hills of my
country, am lonely indeed. I am the desolate god forbidden to utter
my happy laughter. I hide the silver of my speech and the gold of my
merriment. I live in the holes of the rocks and the dark caves of the
sea. I weep in the morning because I may not laugh, and in the evening I
go abroad and am not happy. Where I have kissed a bird has flown; where
I have trod a flower has sprung. But Thought has snared my birds in
his nets and sold them in the market-places. Who will deliver me from
Thought, from the base holiness of Intellect, the maker of chains
and traps? Who will save me from the holy impurity of Emotion, whose
daughters are Envy and Jealousy and Hatred, who plucks my flowers to
ornament her lusts and my little leaves to shrivel on the breasts of
infamy? Lo, I am sealed in the caves of nonentity until the head and the
heart shall come together in fruitfulness, until Thought has wept for
Love, and Emotion has purified herself to meet her lover. Tir-na-nog is
the heart of a man and the head of a woman. Widely they are separated.
Self-centred they stand, and between them the seas of space are flooding
desolately. No voice can shout across those shores. No eye can bridge
them, nor any desire bring them together until the blind god shall find
them on the wavering stream--not as an arrow searches straightly from
a bow, but gently, imperceptibly as a feather on the wind reaches the
ground on a hundred starts; not with the compass and the chart, but by
the breath of the Almighty which blows from all quarters without care
and without ceasing. Night and day it urges from the outside to the
inside. It gathers ever to the centre. From the far without to the deep
within, trembling from the body to the soul until the head of a woman
and the heart of a man are filled with the Divine Imagination. Hymen,
Hymenaea! I sing to the ears that are stopped, the eyes that are sealed,
and the minds that do not labour. Sweetly I sing on the hillside. The
blind shall look within and not without; the deaf shall hearken to
the murmur of their own veins, and be enchanted with the wisdom of
sweetness; the thoughtless shall think without effort as the lightning
flashes, that the hand of Innocence may reach to the stars, that the
feet of Adoration may dance to the Father of Joy, and the laugh of
Happiness be answered by the Voice of Benediction."
from The Crock of Gold by James Stephens
