Resurrection of the Word : Postscript

POSTSCRIPT MAHOYAEL STOPPED speaking. All night he had sung, all through a long and dense, black night, oppressive with storms and great distress. He had sung as though for himself, lost in himself; yet anyone who listened was well aware that Mahoyael in the course of a night, destroyed himself. Mahoyael sang sweetly, as though for himself, but every onc of his words vanished in space, blowing away a fragment of flesh, a morsel of its opaque tissues. Gradually, as each cell disappeared it was replaced by a little light, by the very transfiguration of the cell. When Mahoyail stopped singing he became translucid and luminous. He became a new dawn, and dawn rose. He had sung throughout the excessively oppressive and bitter night. The surrounding shadows had not ceased to moan under the pressure of the dense crowds of humans. Smothered cries, tense whisperings circling Mahoyael's song, continuously beset him with their gloom. Steps. Rhythmic steps. Troops, innumerable troops, marching past. The darkness shuddered. Hymns . . . ensigns were perceived . . . guessed at . . . Mahoyael sang all night. And masses of others had con tinued to march past: it was far too great a burden, far too oppressivc for one night alone. Wan masses, disgusting masses, crowds of all colours: blacks, yellows, grey's; greys of all shades, greys of the grey from not eating, from not washing, of those who wander under bridges, on the benches in towns, on waste- ground and on all the highways ofland and sea; at the bottom of sewers and in the midst of charnel houses. . . . Grey like dust, grey like decaying corpses. . These crowds and their fists. These crowds and their enslaved bodies, on this planet belonging to them; these deprived masses, crowds at the 151 slaughter-houses, everywhere, asleep, sleep-walking, ghostly, menacing crowds, pitiless, threatening, implacable . . . And Mahoyael sang. Throughout all that night he sang, and each of his cells went, every one of them vanishcd; and every onc in this shapeless mass found a heart which received it and felt a thrill. Whoever had seen everything understood that Mahoyail's transfiguration was in the heart of those who had received him. Slowly and surely he came to life in the few rare hearts and minds, one after another, and one by one in the masses who denied him, in whom the Word never ceased to expose its life. The first feeling in someone who had heard Mahoyael was: "How could the song of a man ever raise itself above this vast uproar?" This feeling passed. Mahoyael had sung, but a song that was a contest, an unfaltering contest, until dawn. He who had understood asked himself: 'How can a man hope to fight all the multitudes whose noisy demands fill the world? How does he hope to struggle with them all alone by himself?" But this scepticism also vanished. When the dawn arose Mahoyail gradually dissolved in the light shed everywhere, and when it was fully day Mahoyail was nowhere visible. Because he had won. 152

Carlo Suares, Resurrection of the Word, Shambhala, 1974, p.151-152