Jerusalem

Abstract

Poem Jerusalem “Then keep thy heart ....” Melville, Clarel They will lift up their heads: the Lion Gate, St. Stephen’s,the New, Jaffa, and, last, the Gate of Dung. The gates will lift up their heads that the King of Glory may come in. AsJudah means “Praised,”its chief city will be more highly praised, the ramparts and the towers of David’s citadel praised and exalted. Come this far, how close the door on what not even they had strength enough to bar? The Rock, where Isaac, his wrists bound tight, saw above him a face clench in agony moments before an angel dove down to stay Abraham’s hand is now perpetual, preserved in the furnace of tradition along with that ram whose horn became the shofar. -Or is it rock as fact, one of the sights, coated with dust and roofed with a golden dome reverberant with a murmured sum expanding on the Prophet’s airborne nocturnal journey, which fixed him like a star on the cusp of the crescent moon? Just as the present-day pilgrim goes from station to station in a loud array of discount tours, tenants have reconstrued the basilica of the Holy Sepulcher as real estate for hereditary zeal to balkanize L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 1 1 3 among several sects. Each has its sharply defended square yardage of theology,but none equals that stone niche off to one side where an oil lamp’s starred wick baffles the sway of archaic shadows. The Temple abides in its myth but also in limestone fact, at least the part Roman demolition experts failed to pound into undatable rubble. Foundation Wall, you won’t be alone again, alive with the Shekhinah‘s quiet thunder, bloodwarm dovecote of fissured building blocks into which ten thousand hand-written praises or lamentations have flown. And Via Dolorosa toils south from Gabbatha’s courtyard, where a few detached centurions gave their charge the prescribed flogging before sending him on his forced march. A path useless to retrace without spiriting away two millennia or any obstacle to contemplation of punished flesh at ground zero staggering forward under a massive wooden T, palm fronds still underfoot, but dry and broken, whispering hosannas no one hears. Because a Procurator exercised available options, the name “Pilate”survives globally on the lips of millions when the Credo’s recited tenets descend into history and make it faith. What was truth? What will it be? For the condemned whose breath comes shorter and shorter, “Evendeath may prove unreal at last”-unreal, like the sound of a tree fallen to earth far from any ear, or any human ear. 114 ~ L E VI AT H A N When the body atoned to its trunk and limbs toppled out of time, did it finally become audible to his listener? To some. To Clarel, and for later pilgrims who risked as much as one step beyond doubt. No other dispatch could outdistance the silence following on that farewell to his friendwho , standing at the Place of the Skull, heard him say, “Woman,behold thy son,” as prelude to, “Beholdthy mother.” Seeing where sons of earth were bound to go, from that day forth he housed a second mother under his roof. Lift up your heads. -ALFRED CORN A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 1 1 5 ...