It was a secondary memory, the memory of aeons and universal experience which, though lost to recollection, aghast at the world, aghast at form, had dissolved itself to a secondary form; it was a secondary human language predestined for eternity, if not yet eternal in itself, yet holding the irretrievable in recollection, and in the newly disclosed and re-arched heaven, in the law of its being, perishable even in imperishability, the stars were circling again as an ever-enduring wonder, exempted from chance; immortally cool came the music of night, gently stroked by the unrelenting-soft breath of the moon, carried in it immobile, drenched by the motionless tide of the Milky Way, the ringing silver space encompassed by the incomprehensible, but still encompassing in itself the incomprehensibility of all things human, the homecoming, the second homecoming of dream—,

—, oh homecoming! oh homecoming of him who must no longer be a lodger! irretrievable is that smile in which we were once imbedded, irretrievable the smiling embrace, that fullness of being on awakening or just before awakening, day-brightened but still obscure; oh irretrievable is that tranquility into which we were wont to bury our face, to assure ourselves that what we had seen should not prove to be mere chance; oh everything was ours in being bestowed upon us again, nothing came accidentally to us, nothing was perishable because universal time is imperishable, without continuity; oh universal time, in which nothing was mute to the mute eyes of the child, and everything was a new creation—,

—, oh homecoming, oh music within and about us! submerged in us it has remained with us as a knowledge of yore; submerged in us, we shall be lifted through it into its greater being, and submerged in us, greater than ourselves, it is ours beyond all chance; oh music within and about us! only that which the self harbors is greater than we are, it is immortal for us and exempted from chance, singing along with the word of the spheres, but that which we do not carry within us, that is chance and remains chance, it is mortal for us, neither now nor ever is it greater than we are, it never confines us—,

—, oh homecoming! everything is taken in by a child, everything is music to him, everything is immortal, everything has the greatness of allness, being always there to protect and fulfill him with its smile, since he may fly to its embrace, eye sunk into eye; the universe in all things! Oh, it is irretrievable for us, irretrievable because of our very growth! And should we wax ever so greatly, so that our arms branch out like rivers, our body spread out over continents and oceans unto the utmost limits of the worlds, the moon in our hair, we filling all of space, we ourselves the starry pinnacle of night, the glittering dome of dream, endless, endless in sheer radiation, yet we remain outside of ourselves, we are still expulsed, no night embraces us and no morning welcomes us, because we are bound and dazed, without flight or goal for flight, unsurrendered even to ourselves, because our arms have drawn nothing to our hearts—,

—, oh homecoming, homecoming into the utterly-incomprehensible that will be granted to us when we shall have become prepared to fly to it again; oh, the utterly-incomprehensible that we seek for even in dreams because in dreams fate, our fate, becomes dreamily comprehensible for us; mortal is dream, mortal is fate, both such things of chance that we, bound and dazed even in dream, dazed because of our mortality, bound by chance, dazed by death, seeking escape, fearing escape through flight into dream, shudder back from it, dismayed by the impossible; oh mortal is that chance which is not contained in ourselves and in which we are not contained; all that we comprehend of it is death, for death reveals itself to us in the phenomenon of chance, verily only in chance, but we, neither containing ourselves nor contained in ourselves, bearing death within us, are only accompanied by it, it stands at our side, as it were by chance—

—, oh homecoming, homecoming into the divine, homecoming into the human! mortal to us, indeed, our fellowman whose fate we have not taken upon ourselves, on whom we have bestowed no help, the unloved human being, whom we have not included in our own life and whom we have thereby rendered unable to embrace us inclusively in his own being, oh he seems undivine to us, we seem undivine to him, so enchanced in chance that we hardly know if he, who appears before us as living, who passes by us, who staggers by us and turns the next corner, whether he, creature of fate like any other, like ourselves, has not long since died or perhaps has not even yet been born—

—, oh homecoming! oh, Plotia!—

—, oh homecoming! irretrievable homecoming; mortal are we along with all that is mortal, mortal in ourselves are we who have taken no fate upon us, having in this way made ourselves one with chance, our occurrence and being and knowledge inescapably arrested in the blank form of fate, mortal are we in the midst of immortality, mortal under the music of the stars, mortal through guilt, strayed into a thicket of voices, girded round by the mute-pressing light of the indiscriminate, forfeited to dream-death, forfeited to a death of growing cruelty that no longer holds aught of immortality—

—, oh homecoming! resting and hearkening in the infinite stretch of the Saturnian meadows, in the Saturnian landscape of the earth and the soul, in the golden, homelike peace of eternal earthliness, shielded from Janus, although this is a twofold hearkening, directed upwards and downwards, an intent listening into the depths of heaven and earth for the name of the thing bestowed on it by Saturn, shielded from the deadly cruelty of dissension and war, shielded from destruction, even though the hearkening is at the same time a forgetting, a forgetting of the names that are forgotten by virtue of their association with home—

—, oh homecoming! he who is allowed to come home comes back to creation, he comes there where, behind the fluid boundaries of beginning and ending, behind the comprehensible and incomprehensible, he divines the ultimate statute, he escapes the indiscrimination in which good and evil are benumbed to blank fate-forms, he buries his face in the utterly-incomprehensible from whose relentless-mild voice, fate-bidden and predestined, issues the judgment that existence be loosed from its form and be sundered to right and to left—

—, oh homecoming! oh sorrow redeemed by suffering, the miracle of immortality! Oh, we may be allowed to touch it, we may perhaps obtain an intuitive grasp of the incomprehensible if only for a moment’s length, yet—the heart receiving the miracle—forever, if our including and included destiny take on itself that other, grown higher and wider in surrender, fleeing into yet giving cover to the other one until, with the miracle of the second self which we have borne through the flames, we are granted a second childhood, transformed and belonging to the father, knowledge beyond knowledge, perceiving and perceived, chance come to be miracle, having embraced all knowledge, all occurrence, all existence, fate overcome, not quite here but yet at hand, oh, miracle, oh, the music awakened once more so poignantly, within us and about us, the opened countenance of the spheres, oh, love—

—, oh homecoming! for love is resolution! oh homecoming forevermore! for love is the readiness for creation—

—, and resolution was that perception which, born from dreaming yet giving birth of itself, was flooded to him like an occurrence and yet passively from out the invisible, now become visible; it was a perception in the realm of the speechless and the wordless, a final effort of the dream that awakes of itself and recognizes its own borders, the dream constantly coming home in its own birth, encased in birth’s darkness which, for all that, was still held within the full radiance of the dream. The perception was not in himself, it came out clearly from the invisible crystal of the structure, it was the crystal of dreams. Was this the perception of genii or angels, when they, the listening messengers inherent to the Creation, floating unborn with it, perceived the divine command? Was he floating with them outside of the dream-border? in dream? in recollection? The enormous effort to shatter dream, to shatter fate, did not relax; no, it increased, it became more pressing, directed more to the goal, more toward perception, and the more it grew the more perfect became the visibility of the dream, the more its boundless radiation was interwoven with the recollected or intuitive knowledge of all past earthly happenings, which, the content recognizable despite all change of form, was arising like a second dream within the dome of the first one, overlaying and enriching it, yielding image after image, storing landscape on landscape, in evidence here as of yore,—the dream-existence in the morning of childhood, transparent in its depth of memory, twined about by waters and wreaths, the arch of the unseen heaven above it sparkling with layer upon layer of stars, muteness and music coalesced into crystal, ever experienced yet never remembered, ever perceived yet never understood. And there, surrendering to the succession of images, there he listened to the heart of the dream, and softly at first, then more and more distinctly, he heard the beating at the heart of the dream. For in the memory which mounted up to him or into which he sank—the direction being indeterminable in the quiescence of the occurrence—in this upsurging and absorbing radiation, in this fluid meeting where things merged without movement, there was contained, not less immobile, not less symbolic, that which he had always sought for in language and in poetry and which was again evaporated to nothingness for the sake of understanding; here all speech was annulled, all poetry was annulled, so that only the deepest recesses of the dream-abyss might shine through, as if it were the final form of fate within the unavoidable multiformity, the form which is the pattern of all forms within the radiantly inevitable, knotted and looped, flowing and fixed, but within every form, in every figuration, stretched endlessly and invisibly over the light-plains of dream, dream opened up unto its root-depth to give birth to the dream: oh this, this very depth it was that floated up to the heart, oh in it the heart was floating, radiating up from and into it, interradiated to a knowledge utterly ungraspable through speech; it was the heart of dream entering, enpulsing and suffusing the human heart to a crystalline wholeness and consummation, and he deemed that fate was on the point of being transformed again in the vibration of light-surf into which he sank or which surged up to him as if here, in this last abyss of roots, the new reconciliation of form to its eternal content were about to succeed: the awakening! Oh, the rousing torment of a dreamed awakening, fate-conditioned this too, enclosed in borders within the dream, which presents itself even in the midst of perception although the boundary of dream has already been overstepped, already sundered, because the heart, once having started to beat, constantly pleading for admittance and ready for reality, palpitates even unto its borders and knocks on its portal—

—, for love is abiding readiness, containing every prospect and all peace, for love is creative readiness: not quite here but yet at hand, this is the threshold on which love stands in the forecourt of reality, there where the portals shall swing back to allow the borders of reality to be crossed, opened to awakening, opened to rebirth, opened to the resurrected, the re-animated, the never-heard, the forever-yearned-for language of a new life in ultimately redeemed consummation, opened to the final word of judgment which shall ring beyond any dream-life whatsoever, beyond the world, beyond space, beyond time; oh it is before such a renewal of creation that love stands, still enveloped in twilight and merely hearkening, yet itself the awakening help, the incipient awakening—

—, and the brightness of the dream-dome quivered up and away from itself like the beating of a heart, the dome itself quivering, vibrating in the infinite and voluminous voices of its radiant completeness, in the diffusion, the concentration and refraction of its boundless beam-tracks and light-paths; and the starry pinnacle trembled also, the dream as a whole inhaling and exhaling itself, the breath waiting, the dream waiting, waiting in the recesses of his heart, the receptacle of the spheres waiting. Would the new speech, the new word, the new voice be wrung out of such a breath? Would the voice-source of time’s beginning and ending open of itself, disclosing the cross-road common to all paths in the infinite abyss of dream? Would there, oh, would there be intoned from the dream that spontaneous echo-accord of world-unity, world-order, world-comprehension which would, which must be the final resolution of the earthly task, comprised in the totality of voices and comprising them? Merely an intimation, it was no more than that, an intimate trembling up from the roots of dream, but trembling on and on to the furthest reaches of dream, shutting off the voices and releasing the voices in the wavering light-breath of the occurrence; earthbound still the heart’s beating, but transcending earth in its waiting, still earthbound as the dream-instrument of that fatal force which, unsevered from evil, malice and chance, carried death in itself, but already transcendent in its readiness to hear the command, supernal in its vigilant readiness. Verily, nearer to the unearthly than anything else was this willingness to awaken, nearer than the readiness for death, which was bound up with dying to mundane things, saturated with self-seeking and fame-seeking, with intoxication and hatred; verily, it was nearer to the revelations of death, nearer to it than his own readiness for death, under whose relentlessly unavoidable regency he had placed his life, fancying to force a homecoming through the offering of himself, breaking through the boundaries and listening for the voice as if he could imitate it through his own dying, and win it over by virtue of this imitation. It had remained inimitable, for this was a voice that could not be won over. For this voice of all voices was beyond any speech whatsoever, more compelling than any, even more compelling than music, than any poem; this was the heart’s beat, and must be in its single beat, since only thus was it able to embrace the perceived unity of existence in the instant of the heart’s beat, the eye’s glance; this, the very voice of the incomprehensible which expresses the incomprehensible, was in itself incomprehensible, unattainable through human speech, unattainable through earthly symbols, the arch-image of all voices and all symbols, thanks to a most incredible immediacy, and it was only able to fulfill its inconceivably sublime mission, only empowered to do so, when it passed beyond all things earthly, yet this would become impossible for it, aye, inconceivable, did it not resemble the earthly voice; and even should it cease to have anything in common with the earthly voice, the earthly word, the earthly language, having almost ceased to symbolize them, it could serve to disclose the arch-image to whose unearthly immediacy it pointed, only when it reflected it in an earthly immediacy: image strung to image, every chain of images led into the terrestrial, to an earthly immediacy, to an earthly happening, yet despite this—in obedience to a supreme human compulsion—must be led further and further, must find a higher expression of earthly immediacy in the beyond, must lift the earthly happening over and beyond its this-sidedness to a still higher symbol; and even though the symbolic chain threatened to be severed at the boundary, to fall apart on the border of the celestial, evaporating on the resistance offered by the unattainable, forever discontinued, forever severed, the danger is warded off, warded off again and again, the chain of symbols closed when the unattainable deigns to transform itself into the attainable by descending to earth, by becoming an earthly event, solidified to an earthly deed, so that the chain of expression in ascending and descending could close to a cycle, to a cycle of truth, to a cycle of eternal symbols, true in each of its images, true because of the cyclic balance in play around the opened borders, true in the constant interchange of the divine and the human act, true in their common symbolic quality and in the symbol of their mutual resemblance, true because the creation renewed itself in them forever, entering into the law, into that law of constant rebirth which was charged with the overcoming of chance, of fixation, of death; no earthly preparation for death, were it ever so intuitive an imitation of the divine sacrifice, was able to summon the earthly enactment of the subliminal; only the contemplative preparation for the awakening was really valid, and the dreamer, bound like fate to the dream, unredeemed and averse to death though death-enclosed, harbors in his dream only the preparation for the awakening, made susceptible to it alone by his knowledge, unbetrayable in his dream-knowledge, in his unerring knowledge of the awakening and its universal validity, for the sake of which the dream has revealed itself, opened up in the singing abysses of its unsearchable depths, in the darkly radiating root-abyss of its shimmering shafts, with its heart, even more conscious, opening still more, trembling to a voice that was no longer a voice, far rather a deed, the deed for which it descended to retrieve the name, fate-bidden to turn around, to return for the summons to homecoming—

—, oh homecoming in that deed which signifies love, for only the serving helpful deed, in that it bestows the name and fulfills the empty form of fate, is stronger than fate itself—

—, not quite here but yet at hand! And it was knowledge at the heart of an inconceivable loving distance that was buried in the innermost heart of the dream, it was awareness of the similarity in that tidal flood, the heart of this side and the heart of the beyond pulsing and beating within each other, the divine symbol kindled in the human being to a common language, the language of the divine-human pledge of allegiance, the language of everlasting creation in prayer and more prayer, mounting and subsiding in creative images; and it was the knowledge of this language of the redeeming deed, of this language of loving sacrifice, which floated as far above every human offering as the envoiced other-worldliness of the one voice floated over the babble of voices on earth, as the loving other-worldliness floated above every love that operates from man to man, the divine-human heart contained in divinity and humanity, containing both god and man; but it was likewise an awareness of him who—because the voice to be credible on earth must have an announcer—was destined to be the bearer of the creative deed, the deed and the doer born into earthly life from an unearthly conception, for only he who in his very origin is already exempt from chance is able to reunite chance with the miracle of that ultimate lawfulness to which fate itself is subjected; for only he who originates from a destiny beyond fate and who, despite this, drains the destined calamity to the last drop, only he is given grace to turn calamity into salvation again and to become the bearer of salvation; oh to him and only to him, the divinely-conceived figure in heroic human form, is it permitted to carry the father across the fires of iniquity, and he alone is entrusted with the rescue of the father, he is allowed to carry the one who conceived him, taking him on his shoulders and bearing him off to the ship and to the homecoming flight into a new country, into the land of promise that has always been the homeland of the father. Not quite here, but yet at hand! That land lay before him in the knowledge of the enjoining, name-giving father-summons which embodies the divine in the human and inspirits the human into the divine; it lay before him in radiation and counter-radiation, it lay before him in the knowledge of the salvation-bearer and in the salvation-bearer’s knowledge, full of humanity, full of divinity, the brands of iniquity changed to pure sacrificial flames, the rigidity shattered, the gravestone of the middle lifted, good and evil parted and purified, god and man enlarged to a resurrected creation, the prophecy reclaimed in a future in the name of the father, forever sanctified in the name of the son, forever affianced in the spirit, not quite here but yet at hand, the promised one. Was that which he perceived already recognition? was it only the recognition in dream? was it already the awakening? Oh, it was still this side of the boundary, but even though the dream palpitated against it, it had not broken through the border; the vision was not to be grasped, it was not recognition, it was only awareness, a dreamawareness, a dream-recollection, a distant memory of the never-heard, ever-resounding voice of a Once, the furthest recollection of the never-encountered land beyond the border, through which he had always wandered, a land enlarged by distance, reduced by distance, the source, the estuary; it was the memory-strengthened approach to the border, but it was still a spellbound quivering, a throbbing, expectant illumination. And just for that reason, even in this peering knowledge, in this extremely transparent blindness, that without being recognition was a form of recognition, a transparent bandage over his eyes, yes, for that reason, although sunk into the dream-meadows and overgrown by their bracken, he found himself placed abruptly on the peak of a very high mountain, as if he had been ordered there so that he might look beyond the border, he a beholder, but still not an announcer, placed there and held there by a gentle-unyielding hand, held into a future yet always existent actuality, beat upon by the throbbing of a heart that though enshrined in him yet enshrined him by being greater than himself; breathing with reality and animated by this throbbing, he was enabled to release his arms from the crystalline transparency and to stretch them upward, upward toward the luminous dome wherein the stars were shining and great suns were beginning to revolve, a single star above them all: he gazed out over the fields of dream, over the fields of those countries predestined to be the theater of the deed, the theater of his vision, beyond touch, beyond tread, yet his own from the very start; he gazed out, spellbound, dreambound here as he was, unable to part from or to be removed from his dream, gazing out over the landscape in which, though it was beyond his touch and tread, he was stretched out with his own dream radiation and his own dream illumination and, surveying both the landscape and the dream, he saw that they were reciprocally merged, he saw amidst the landscape all the crystalline formations, the light-cubes, the light-circles, the light-pyramids, the light-clusters of the dream; he saw, stretched out and imbedded in the dreamy confluence and boundless radiation of its light-paths, the landscape, made rich, transparent and magical through memory; indeed, it was imbedded in the dream with all its night-times and day-times, vacillating between light and darkness, inflating and deflating under the twofold dusk of morning and evening, filled with every possible kind of earthly shape, filled with a motley crowd of all creaturehood, filled with the roaring medley of all earthly voices, filled with intoxication, with torment, with yearning, filled with the created and the developing creation, filled with the silence of beaches, of undulating meadows and of fading mountain summits,—the heights bearing loneliness and the plains bearing cities,—filled with the peaceful glow of human life and living but also filled by the rustling and crackling of the evil flames, endless, endless, endless; everything there was to be wandered through, nothing could be trodden, dream and landscape imbedded one into the other, shining into and shading out into each other, joined in expectation, joined in yearning, joined in a readiness for awakening, waiting to receive him who would stride through them, bringing the voice of the awakening. And he too was waiting; with uplifted arms he waited with dream and landscape, he gazed over the still pastures on which the cattle were grazing without motion, he perceived the muteness of the motionlessly burning brands, and no bird-flight moved across the pavilion of the air; the flames rose higher into the immobility, the confusion of the manifold voices increased in the unbreakable silence, the yearning became deeper and deeper, the suns stood still and the throbbing of the heart beat more and more heavily against the walls of the boundlessness within and without—, oh when was the end to be? where was the end to be found? when would the desecration be quaffed to the last drop? Was there a nethermost stage to this deepening silence? And then it seemed to him that just such an ultimate silence had now been achieved. For he saw the mouths of men gaping at each other full of terror, no sound wrenched itself from the dry clefts and no one understood the other. It was the last step of silence on earth, it was the ultimate silencing of men; and beholding this his mouth also yearned to open in a last mute cry of horror. Still while seeing it, almost before he had really seen it, he no longer saw anything. For the visible had vanished into most abrupt darkness, the light of dream quenched, the landscape disappeared, the flames quelled, the people evaporated, the mouths abolished, this was night, timeless, spaceless, wordless, toneless, the most empty blackness, an empty night without form and without content; empty and black became the waiting, even the throbbing died down, sucked up by emptiness. The bottom of existence had been reached. He stood at the boundary, he stood at the edge of destiny, at the border of chance, he stood at the boundary with blank expectation, with blank listening, with blank looking, with blank wisdom, yet drained as he was and in this blankness he knew that the borderline would be opened. This began to happen very softly as if not to alarm him. It began as a whisper that he had heard once before, it began in his innermost ear, in his innermost soul, in his innermost heart, yet simultaneously surrounding him and penetrating him, stemming from the uttermost darkness, streaming in and out of the night; it was the same quietly great power of the tone to which once before he had had to submit in repentance, swelling out now as then, fulfilling him, enwrapping him, although it was no longer the accord of many voices; it was not the accord of the voice-herds, it was not the accord of any voice-multiplicity, instead it was far rather a single voice, making itself more and more solitary, a voice of such great loneliness that it glowed like a single star in the darkness, nevertheless an invisible one shining in the invisible, for as the summons grew greater and more distinct, it was subsumed not less greatly into the infinite and inscrutable, which is inaudible because it is mute: what took place here was beyond the visible and the audible, it was beyond the reach of every sense-perception, it happened obscurely and for all that it was of a most compelling, perceptible clarity; it happened in a realm of shadows, yet included the forms of every essence, oh, it occurred as equilibrium, it was manifested as an infinite, inconceivably balanced order, giving meaning, content and name, comprised of all being and all memory, including the iron booming of seas as well as the silver susurrus of autumn, the celesta-stroke of the stars as well as the warm breathing of flocks, the flutetone of the moon even as the dew on the sunny hedges of childhood; it was a beholding of the unbeholdable, a listening into the inaudible, and he flooded in darkness, the world’s diversity and entity likewise held in balance within the flood of darkness, in this last command to equilibrium which is the only reality and which annuls chance, he heard, no he did not hear, he saw the voice which brought this to pass; and it was not one of those voices which, belonging to the world, insert themselves into the structure of world-facts in order to turn them into a symbol, symbolizing one thing by another but also symbolizing the word by the word, this was not the voice of worldly truth, neither one of them nor the summation of all such truths, no, it was unterrestrially, inaudibly, invisibly beyond the world; it was the extra-worldly agent of truth, the extra-worldly agent of equilibrium, it was the essence of the outside, bringing near all the strength and all the amplitude of the outside as it brought itself nearer, comprehending all that is within in order to be comprehended by it, the all-embracing receptacle of the spheres; and thus he realized it, hearing by seeing, seeing by hearing the voice in the shadow of whose word peace and homeland are ever to be found, the voice of timelessness and of the everlasting creation, the judgment-voice of the beginning and the end, the equilibrating voice outside the dream, the voice of safe-keeping; its tone was brazen and crystal and flute-like in one; it was thunder and the preponderance of silence, and it was all sounds and yet a single sound, commanding and gentle, forgiving and discerning, a single lightning-flash, oh, an unspeakably gentle blinding, quiet because consummate; oh, thus it disclosed itself, grace fused with the pledge, disclosing itself not as word, not as speech, far rather as symbol of a word, as symbol of all speech, as symbol of every voice, as the arch-image of them all, overcoming fate in the form of the holy father-summons; it revealed itself as the tone-picture of the annunciating deed: “Open your eyes to Love!”

SOMETHING was being done, and it was being done for him. He did not have to open his eyes, the beneficence opened them for him. He did not have to breathe, it breathed him. This had been a symbolization in the allegory of which the night was restored to itself, and, in the symbolization of the voice, muteness came home to silence as if silence were the first content with which the empty form must again be filled in order to be revived. And, by virtue of the fulfillment, the diverse directions of the dream were streaming back to the earthly spaces; they streamed back from an undimension into a dimension, turned into the flow of night, constituting a space that was flooded by the tides of night. Nothing was audible except the silence, nothing within, nothing outside of him; he was flooded in a saturation of night, the silence surrounded by night. Even the little oil flame of the hanging lamp had burned itself out, as though sucked up by the darkness in order that the all-fulfilling silence should not be interrupted or disturbed by the small hard point of light. In a like manner the great throbbing of the dream had quieted down, had ebbed and was ebbing further, lulling itself into a silvery drizzle that welling up from a nowhere and flowing off into a nowhere yet issued from the wall-fountain. Rinsed by the surrounding silence, the elusive had come to rest again between the past and the future in the vividly present now; softly the scale of time was swaying, softly tinkling were the silver chains of its saucers, which in their gradual rise and fall met and released symbol after symbol, weighing their truth, symbol after symbol given significance by the test of weighing; and the linking of this chain merged softly and silverly into the gentle stream of existence, newly fulfilled. Fulfilled by an imageless silence yet image-fraught.