It may come to the notice of posterity (and then again it may not) that this, our age, ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new. The one old way to be new no longer served. Science put it into our heads that there must be new ways to be new. Those tried were largely by subtraction — elimination.
ÔÇôRobert Frost (1925)
The Wizard frowned and told a parable.
Its ancient, dark protagonist: The Bull .
Not A , but The — Picasso"s, and Lascaux"s.
His agonist, the way the story goes,
A Vivisectionist, or Matador,
If you prefer. The set: a Ring. A Door.
Gay pennoncels, just as you may imagine.
A roar... a hush... here Power meets its surgeon.
Clarions! — That feeling-first-the-hoof
As a tremor in the earth, before the awful
Flesh-storm: tiny eye, red, chrysalid,
Malevolent, the crescent horn, the sliding,
Sluglike muscle-hump, the great, truncate
Bellowing...
Shall we interrogate
What the surgeon"s lancet, swirled on an oilstone
Foil-fine, feels, before, abrupt, at bone,
It stops? Nothing. Not motor nerve, not tendon.
The beast might just as well be fog. And in
Jig-time, a blink of little snicker-snacks,
The great rogue thing is changed. Like a strain of anthrax
" Defanged " in the lab — attenuated ,
I believe they say, against escape. Crate
Him up. Spill him out. Call him The Bull.
Now try to discover, somewhere in the crumple,
A nostril, vinyl smooth, still flaring, moist.
Now hold a mirror close. Clouds may amaze
Its surface, yet. May form, reform. Such joys
Are something subtle, says the Wizard. Res
Poetica : less, less. Scry these cloud-wraiths
By all means, if not for a human face.