There are six songs, no, seven, that need to be sung in the darkness:
The Battle on the Plains, where heroes stood and fell; the Finding of the Treasure where it was hard to get to; the Founding of the Fields, where all expanded in peace; the Dancing on the Lawns where there was nothing wrong; the Visit to the Sky, which was no wearying journey; the Farewell to the Guide, when the next stage was reached; the Darkening of It All, when it had become too late.
At first our heroes stood for us, then among us, when we stood for ourselves; now they do not even represent our sorrows. The Paul Bunyan balloon was deflated and put away when Thanksgiving had passed. Miss America farted into the microphone as if thereby to bear true witness to beauty, but that was only last season’s attraction. No hero sums us up, no clown can contain us, and the Book of the People of the Book is in tatters.
So that what was lost at the end of each age was the image- not one to be discerned in water or fancied in clouds, but the image that inhered in the palpable One, letting it be at once paradigm of the Many and flesh of itself.
And so at the end of the day, the sky deepening as we walked back from the Prater, or home from the zoo, or along the river away from the fun-fair, the youngest child’s balloon, the dark one, escaped from a fist tired at last, vanishing into its own element of the color between day and night.
Which the bandstand acknowledged in sweet conclusions, as horn and mellophone resolved their faintly crowded, adjacent ƒ and g downward to e and g, firm in the faith that the ground was bearing up under them, making it seem that there had never been ƒ, that thus it had ever been, healing, until the close of the soft cadence, the dominant wound.
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