Elijah on Mt. Carmel
WARREN, ROBERT PENN
Elijah on Mt. Carmel By Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet Being a design, in stained glass, for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City, showing Elijah,...
...Ultimately I realized that the real reason she could not be tolerated was that, simply, she was a screaming bore...
...The others in the crowd, though, listened with worshipful looks on their faces...
...He then recommended John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth ("it will make your hair curl...
...How then on that sea-cliff he prayed, fire fell, sky darkened...
...but in many areas is religious and mystically inclined," said Branden...
...And he screamed...
...They had been told—and they believed it—that they were in on something earth-shakingly new and consequential...
...So, Eyes shut, breath scant, he heard her breath rip the lamp-flame To blackness, and by that sweet dog-bait, lay, and it came, The soft hand-grope he knew he could not, nor wished to, resist Much longer...
...She wants to uproot it, to cry down from the mountain-tops like a god, to tell people what is Truth and what is not: "The middle is always evil, reason is the only absolute...
...and prayed: "Dear God, oh...
...Speaking with a strong Russian accent, she went on and on, laying down dogma after dogma, without a trace of self-doubt or hesitation or humor...
...How could he ever tell her...
...Soon, In the scented chamber, She, Saying, "Baby, Baby, Just hush, now hush, it's all right," Would lean, reach out, and lay a finger To his lips to allay the infatuate gabble...
...Then Ayn Rand came forward and answered some puerile questions from the awe-struck audience...
...Ahead of the mud-faltered fetlock He screamed, and of Ahab huddled in The frail vehicle under the purpling wrack And spilled gold of storm—poor Ahab, who, From metaphysical confusion and lightning, had nothing to run to But the white Phoenician belly and commercial acuity Of Jezebel: the nether millstone, and upper, of History...
...Lastly, it was T. Robsjohn-Gibbings' Mona Lisa's Moustache, a book that demonstrates how non-objective art is "anti-reason, anti-industrial, in addition to being just plain psychotic...
...Therefore nothing Must be believed, But To have truth Something must be believed, And repetition and congruence, To say the least, are necessary, and His thorn-scarred heels and toes with filth horn-scaled Spurned now the flint-edge and with blood-spurts flailed Stone, splashed mud of Jezreel...
...she yearns to exercise her wishes and dreams upon it...
...Oh, why to that hairy one should God have hearkened, who smelled like a goat...
...They could stand alone and aloof, like Ayn Rand herself, without obligations to humanity, without ties to history, free of all pain and suffering and death and injustice...
...At first impression she seemed a simple New England school-marm, small and somewhat stocky, wearing a simple print dress, hair cropped close and severe, face square and bony...
...Nothing is re-enacted...
...Tell how around her high altar The prinking and primped Priests, Limping, had mewed, And only the gull-mew was answer, No fire to heaped meats, only sun-flame, And the hairy one laughed: "Has your god stepped aside to make peo-pace...
...They had been told that Objectivism would put them in with the elite: the power and glory of life belonged to them, it was theirs for the taking, they could—no, should—make all the money they wanted, without thinking once of other men...
...When he himself Now scarcely believed it...
...please—dear God, don't exist...
...Carmel By Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet Being a design, in stained glass, for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City, showing Elijah, after the miraculous fall of fire on his altar, the breaking of the drouth, and the slaughter of the priests of Baal, as he girds up his loins and runs ahead of the chariot of Ahab to the gates of Jezreel...
...Get nerve to...
...Nothing Is true...
...Rain fell, the drouth broke now, for God had hearkened, And priests gave their death-squeal...
...He had seen glory more blood-laced than any he had dreamed...
...Far, far ahead of the chariot tire, Which the black mud sucked, he screamed, Screaming in glory Like A bursting blood blister...
...Yes, how could he tell her...
...The king hid eyes with his coat...
...But her restless, blazing, demonic eyes dispel that impression: Her drive is truly messianic, she is the Ultimate Female avenging herself on the male world...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 37
