“Aniara”, Poem 9, by Harry Martinson
There are in the mima certain features
it had come up with and which function there
in circuitry of such a kind
as human thought has never traveled through.
For example, take the third webe’s action
in the focus-works
and the ninth protator’s kinematic read-out
in the flicker phase before the screener-cell
takes over everything, allots, combines.
The inventor was himself completely dumbstruck
the day he found that one half of the mima
he’d invented lay beyond analysis.
That the mima had invented half herself.
Well, then, as everybody knows, he changed
his title, had the modesty
to realize that once she took full form
she was the superior and he himself
a secondary power, a mimator.
The mimator died, the mima stays alive.
The mimator died, the mima found her style,
progressed in comprehension of herself,
her possibilities, her limitations:
a telegrator without pride, industrious, upright,
a patient seeker, lucid and plain-dealing,
a filter of truth, with no stains of her own.
Who then can show surprise if I, the rigger
and tender of the mima on Aniara,
am moved to see how men and women, blissful
in their faith, fall on their knees to her.
And I pray too when they are at their prayer
that it be true, all this that is occurring,
and that the grace this mima is conferring
is glimpses of the light of perfect grace
that seeks us in the barren house of space.
Pour thine all freely from the Vase in thy right hand, and lose no drop! Hath not thy left hand a vase?
Transmute all wholly into the Image of thy Will, bringing each to its true token of Perfection!
Dissolve the Pearl in the Wine-cup: drink, and make manifest the Virtue of that Pearl!
― Aleister Crowley, The Heart of the Master & Other Papers
At church, with meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorn'd the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village
I withdraw the aphorism, and give you in its place a simple law of physics: “No machine ever produces as much as it consumes”
— Orson Welles, The Other Side Of The Wind