Meanwhile the 'bats' go further yet to hint
At ancient symbols linked to devilment.
At one point saying they ARE SONS OF CAIN
Admitting darkly THEY WERE NEVER MEN
But were BAD ANGELS who FELL and then were DAMNED
Yet somehow now GUARD THE EMBERS of MIND.
They repeat a myth about their 'fall'
That we'll examine later in this tale.
But first let's try to see what 'beings' could
Possess a nature fully turned from good.
They are a different form of consciousness:
Pure rationality blotting out sense
And feeling, as if life could grow and thrive
Through opposition to being alive.
This opposition is expressed by this:
They persecute FEELING with thoroughness.
In this their awkward naturelessness showsโ
For life is but the body feeling grows.
The problem for pure rationality
Lies in its inconceivability;
The element that we call 'rational'
Can only grow, linked to a living will;
And living will must serve the surge of lifeโ
Not only mind's cold analytic knife.
This tension between pure feeling and thought
Shows forms of life turn into what they're not,
And only live as long as opposites
Fight out a war neither side wins nor quits.
Without this tightrope between heart and mind,
Human life can't be or be defined.
And yet this balance is the corner that
Pure rationality must somehow cut.
So the strange and murky bat-thing mission
(That's linked, somehow to nuclear fission)
Exists within a logic so bizarre
That we can't grasp what its foundations are.
And flashing in this impossible space
The concept of 'pure evil' shows its face.
By which I mean, 'evil' can be defined
In just this way: the essence of 'pure mind',
Which can exist in neither thought nor sense,
Which yet claws ceaselessly towards existence.
Which through non-being inverts itself to be
A precondition of realityโฆ
And do the bat-things' sayings about BLACK HOLES
Hint at this paradox of 'evil souls'?
They call black holes 'an evil they RELEASED'
Of which WILL TO NOTHINGNESS is a tasteโ
Thus their anti-matter mythos taps
The modern sense of spiritual collapse,
As if the answer to modern despair
Lies hidden in a subatomic lair.
And so we see how throughout culture, evil,
May install itself at every level;
By riding in the spirit of revolt
It smuggled in the pillars of its cult.
And thus in the twentieth century,
We discern an escalating orgy
Of negativity turned into law,
A locking of the modern anguish jaw.
The bats admit THEY are the anti-matterโ
Could their intentions be made any clearer?
To make their sense of life start to make sense
Picture non-life pressed up against life's fenceโฆ
By very nature, lifeless to the core,
Yet pulled with urgency to living's door;
They close around, and tremble helplessly
Enslaved by lust for what can never be;
They worship at the altar of a plan:
From nothingness, to build the anti-man;
And raise themselves, the overriding race,
To swarmingly usurp our human place,
For if the lifeless life-plan push succeeds
In crawling from the non-existence weeds,
Then we'll be shackled to a downward slope:
Enslaved decaying human isotope.
They are the speck from which evil is pearled;
They are the anti-being underworld;
The buzzing priests of mysteries designed
To melt the will and paralyze the mind;
Their madness is evil's hopeless fight;
Their dawn would be our plunge into pure night.
In the first book Ephraim describes a cliff
Over which a flood is frozen, massive,
Recalling Q's nod to โthe precipiceโ;
Mirroring, we might suppose, just this:
The coming confrontation of the flood
With God's will and with living human blood.
The flood that is the final crashing in
Of what, in war and love, has always been
The bitter hatred and the hated foe,
The unrelenting rending of our woe,
The slipping that in every effort tips
The balance from the hopeful hand that grips,
All we lose and all blindly destroy,
All never-loved, all never-hoped-for joy.
The faceless hunger guttering the abyss
Is screeching out its hydra-headed hiss.
Now who, humans, will rise to fight this war?
Rise friends! Fight! It is what we are here for.