Eric Gill. Pencil & colored paper (1921)
from The Anathemata (Rite and For-time)
This man, so late in time, curiously surviving, shows courtesy
to the objects when he moves among, handles or
puts aside the name-bearing instruments, when he shows every day in
his hand the salted cake given for this gens to savour all the gentes.
*****
What, from this one’s cranial data, is like to have been his kindred’s psyche; in that they, along with the journey-food, donated the votive horn? and with what pietas did they donate these among the dead—the lifegivers—and by what rubric?
Was their oral gloss from a Heidelberg gaffer or did they emend a Piltdown use, was the girl from Lime Street a butty of theirs, or were the eight Carmel fathers consanguine or of any affinity to those that fathered them
*****
or were the eight Carmel fathers consanguine or of
any affinity to those that fathered them, that told what they had heard with their ears of those german to them, before the palmy arbours began again to pine —and at which of the boreal oscillations?
And before them?
those who put on their coats to oblate the things set apart in an older Great Cold.
And who learned them
if not those whose fathers had received or aped the groping disciplina of their cognates, or lost or found co-laterals, on the proto-routes or at the lithic foci?
Tundra-wanderers?
or was there no tundra as yet, or not as yet again, to wander —but grew green the rashes over again? Or was all once again informis, that Cronos for the third time might see how his lemmings run and hear the cry of his tailless hare from south of the sixties, from into the forties?
For the phases and phase-groups
sway toward and fro within that belt of latitude.
There’s where the world’s a stage
for transformed scenes
with metamorphosed properties
for each shifted set.
The mimes deploy:
anthropoid
anthropoi.
Who knows at what precise phase, or from what floriate green-room, the Master of Harlequinade, himself not made, maker of sequence and permutation in all things made, called us from our co-laterals out, to dance the Funeral Games of the
Great Mammalia, as, long, long, long before, these danced out
the Dinosaur?
