The  Origin  of  the  Praise  of  God

Robert Bly

for Lewis Thomas

 

My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa! And it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow; translators of Vergil who burn up the whole room; the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment; this is the body. So beautifully carved inside, with the curves of the inner ear, and the husk so rough, kunckle-brown.

As we walk, we enter the magnetic fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see; and a being inside us leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. When we come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling energies, slowly circling smells; and the protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges, tornadoes, octopuses.

So the space between two people diminishes, it grows less and less, no one to weep; they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us start out on a pilgrimage to their Savior, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door.

And it was after that they found their friends, who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world. The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms. The cells dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them. To them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the throat of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says: “Now do you still say you cannot choose the Road?”