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What Design Can’t Do
Essays on Design and Disillusion
Silvio Lorusso
Set Margins’ #26

Set Margins’ #26
What Design Can’t Do:
Essays on Design and Disillusion
by Silvio Lorusso
ISBN: 978-90-833501-3-4
Graphic design: Federico Antonini
(www.federicoantonini.info)
Advisor: Freek Lomme
Copy-editing: Isobel Butters
Printed by Balto Print (Vilnius)
Print run: 4000
Typeset in: HAL Timezone
First edition: 2023
Unless otherwise credited, all images
reproduced in this book are the property
of their respective authors. Every effort
has been made to trace copyright holders
and to obtain their permission for
the use of copyrighted material. In the
event of any copyright holder being
inadvertently omitted, please contact
the publisher directly.
The citations from Italian, French and
Portuguese sources were translated
by the author. All the links referenced
in this book were visited on the 28th
August, 2023.
This publication is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-sa/4.0/.
Set Margins’
www.setmargins.press

Praise for What Design Can’t Do

“Are you a bit depressed about design? This book might
help you understand why. It may also make you laugh.
With a lightness of touch, Silvio Lorusso provides an
unflinching but well-reasoned discussion as to how design
has become so ‘bigged up’ and what this actually means
for its practitioners. After reading this book, design will
never look the same to you.”
– Guy Julier, author of Economies of Design
“What happens once design is a smokescreen and can
no longer claim to be a blueprint for change? This is the
question Silvio Lorusso puts on the table. How did form,
no matter how cool and disruptive, become so futile and
tired? Read this with caution: we can no longer design
ourselves out of this painful realisation.”
– Geert Lovink, author of Stuck on the Platform
“The disillusion of design is the disillusion of the world. This
book is an essential read, not only for specialists. Because
design affects us all, and because understanding where
design fails helps us understand where design succeeds.”
– Emanuele Quinz, author of Strange Design
“Italo-pessimist design critique at its best.”
– Clara Balaguer, cultural worker
and grey literature circulator

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: Starter Pack p. 14
1. In the Middle p. 32
PART I. EXPECTATIONSPART I. EXPECTATIONS
2. Everything Everyone All at Once:
On Design Panism p. 72
3. A Complex Relationship:
On Synthesis and Autonomy p. 96
4. Flipping the Table:
On Power and Impotence p. 130
PART II. REALITYPART II. REALITY
5. Form Follows Format:
On Semi-Automation and Cultural
Professionalism p. 168
6. Kritikaoke:
On Ornamental Politics
and Identity as a Skill p. 208
7. The School as Real World:
On Aspirations and Compromise p. 244
Epilogue: Ragequit p. 290
Acknowledgements p. 306
Bibliography p. 310
Index of Names p. 334

To my friends

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 12

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“The challenge of modernity is to live with-
out illusions and without becoming disillu-
sioned.”
– Antonio Gramsci, 1929-35
1
“Until today, the history of design has re-
mained a history of defeats, suffered by the
high-flying aspirations of the designers in their
battle against utilization by Das Kapital. ”
– Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1972
2
1 Antonio Gramsci. Letters from Prison. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
2 Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “Remarks Concerning the New York Universitas
Project.” In The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post-Technological Society,
edited by Emilio Ambasz. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006, p. 107.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 14
Prologue:
Starter Pack

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 15
“[…] a fantastic paradox [concerns] modern in-
dustrial society and the way people live and act
in it. It is the contradiction between the appar-
ent omnipotence of humanity over its physi-
cal environment (the fact that technique is be-
coming more and more powerful, that physical
conditions are increasingly controlled, that we
are able to extract more and more energy from
matter) and, on the other hand, the tremen-
dous chaos and sense of impotence concern-
ing the proper affairs of society, the human af-
fairs, the way social systems work, etc.”
– Paul Cardan (Cornelius Castoriadis), 1965
3
“Soon chaos will be our common denomina-
tor, we carry it within us and we will find it
simultaneously in a thousand places, every-
where chaos will be the future of order, or-
der already no longer makes sense, it is noth-
ing more than an empty mechanism and we
wear ourselves out to perpetuate it so that it
can consign us to the irreparable.”
– Albert Caraco, 1982
4
“In practice, of course a designer’s life is as
mud
dled, informal, and accident-prone, as most
people’s lives manage to be; not only behind the
scenes, but sometimes in front of them.”
– Norman Potter, 1969
5
According to Victor Papanek, an early environmentalist,
countercultural designer and outspoken critic of US con-
sumerism, design is “the conscious and intuitive effort
to impose meaningful order.” Hence, tidying up a desk,
curating a party playlist, structuring the chapters of a
book… all of these activities can be understood as a design
endeavour. It is distressing, however, to realise that very
few human activities escape this definition. If this is the
case, what specific kind of order are designers meant to
3 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Crisis of Modern Society, Solidarity pamphlet No. 23,
1965. https://libcom.org/article/crisis-modern-society-cornelius-castoriadis.
4 Albert Caraco. Breviario del caos. Milano: Adelphi, 1998, p. 93.
5 Norman Potter.What Is a Designer? Things, Places, Messages. London: Hyphen
Press, 2006, p. 19.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 16
A particularly niche graphic design starter pack.
Source unknown.

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 17
impose? And is it in any way more stable than the fragile,
provisional order that we all attempt to carve, like a horde
of industrious archivists in the Tower of Babel?
As every parent entering their kid’s room knows, if design
is about order, its precondition is not void, but chaos.
6
The
book you are reading locates itself within chaos. As such,
it’s a weird design book. It explores the disorder that can’t
be contained, the mess that overflows the dams of what we
consider arranged and designed, including our mental mod-
els and subjectivities. Imposing a meaningful order begins
with drawing the line that separates what is subject to the
design effort from what it is not: the former is what design-
ers generally call ‘problem.’ Design is a magic circle that
produces an orderly inside and a chaotic outside. Designers
safeguard and rework the circle’s shifting border,
7
and place
ideas, things and people either within it or without it. But
the line is porous: our attempts at ordering are inevitably
artificial and their outcome necessarily unstable: entropy
corrodes the negentropic islands that we call our projects.
Order is always under siege. Chaos seeps in, corrupts the
magic circle, erodes its contour. This collection of essays
traces such erosion. Whereas what’s inside design’s magic
circle can be defined, the chaos that surrounds it can only
be described. Hence, What Design Can’t Do is about describ -
ing more than prescribing.
Nowadays, chaos appears to be more powerful than
order. Global-scale logistic systems seem as flawed as our
tiny life projects. This is why today, more than ever, design
6 This is something that novelist Mary Shelley already pointed out in 1831:
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void,
but out of chaos.” The quote comes from a preface to her novel Frankenstein; or
The Modern Prometheus. The plot seems to suggest that traces of chaos reside
in the order, or even that order is nothing but provisionally patched chaos, like
the body-corpse of the monster. See Maria Popova. “‘Frankenstein’ Author
Mary Shelley on Creativity.” The Marginalian (blog), June 25, 2018. https://www.
themarginalian.org/2018/06/25/mary-shelley-creativity-franksenstein-1831/.
7 The general tendency is toward the border’s extension: “And so we have been
forced to expand the boundaries of the systems we deal with, trying to internalize
those externalities.” Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a
General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (June 1, 1973): 155–69, p. 159.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 18
is polarised. It feels either all-encompassing, infrastruc-
tural, planetary, big, baffling – or improvisational, ad-hoc,
tiny, volatile. “Today’s design culture is an expression of our
intense prototype lives – wails Geert Lovink – [p]recarity as
an open and free lifestyle is getting stuck in a never-ending
series of failures. Projects either fall through or never get
finished. Life feels like an endless row of proposals.”
8
Every problem is a wicked problem:
9
its resolution is
temporary, its paradigm ever-shifting, its focus evolving.
How can one provide yet another abstract definition of the
design process when the circumstances of a messy reality
are so imposing? Design is left with only one option: star-
ing chaos in the eyes, waiving the somewhat reassuring
notion of ‘complexity.’
10
For chaos is not complexity: com-
plexity is a field where various forms of expertise compete;
chaos is the repressed that returns when the experts fail.
If, as James Bridle argues, “complexity is not a condition
to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned,”
11
chaos is a griev-
ance that has nothing to teach.
Things do not only appear intricate: they feel meaning-
less, alien, even to those of us who have devoted them-
selves to the cause of order. Designers are torn between
having to believe, for professional and vocational reasons,
in the modern promise of a harmonic, fluid orderliness
and being caught in an absurd, glitchy reality. They are the
ideal type of a hyper-modern subjectivity – disillusioned
evangelists who are losing faith.
“Mess is the Law,” declares architect Jeremy Till: “It has
taken me this long to work out that maybe architecture
8 Geert Lovink. “Precarious by Design.” In Entreprecariat: Everyone Is
an Entrepreneur, Nobody Is Safe, by Silvio Lorusso. Eindhoven: Onomatopee,
2019. pp. 10-12.
9 A wicked problem is a problem that can’t be unambiguously and definitively
solved because its formulation is incomplete, shifting or even contradictory.
The term was coined by design theorists Rittel and Webber, op. cit .
10 Hardly surprisingly many design papers and essays begin by paying an
introductory tribute to complexity.
11 James Bridle. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London:
Verso, 2018, p. 138.

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Critical Graphic Design (2015).
Source: https://hahahardcore.tumblr.com/post/107967560350.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 20
is a mess; not an aesthetic mess but a much more com-
plex social and institutional mess.”
12
Writing in the ’70s,
architect Giancarlo De Carlo was more hopeful: “The mere
sound of the word disorder generally provokes irrepress-
ible neurosis, so it must be made clear that disorder does
not mean the accumulation of a systematic dysfunction,
but on the contrary the expression of a higher functional-
ity capable of including and making manifest the complex
interplay of all the variables involved in a spatial event
[...] The salvation of the world – in all fields, from poli
-
tics to aesthetics – is in disorder as the alternative of a
constricting and overwhelming order that can no longer
be shared.”
13
In a similar vein, Henri Bergson argued that
chaos is an order that we cannot see.
14
What if, instead, we
think of order as a chaos that we try to ignore? Theodor
Adorno believed that the task of art was to bring chaos
into order.
15
Let’s at least bring it into focus.
Talking of her book Composing a Life, anthropologist
Mary Catherine Bateson wrote that the project “started
from a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of
desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying
to make something coherent from conflicting elements to
fit rapidly changing settings.”
16
Here, I engage with a sim-
ilar urgency, which I believe to be commonly felt. To do so,
I explore the mechanisms that are put forward to maintain
the illusion of order and the confidence in those who can
bring it about. The goal is to shed light on the sense of dis-
illusionment deriving from the distance between orderly
expectations and a chaotic reality. A focus on this distance,
12 Jeremy Till. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013, p. XII.
13 Giancarlo De Carlo. La piramide rovesciata: architettura oltre il ’68. Macerata:
Quodlibet, 2018, pp. 112-4.
14 Quoted in Tomás Maldonado. La speranza progettuale: ambiente e società. Torino:
Einaudi, 1997, p. 112.
15 Theodor W. Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London:
Verso, 1978, p. 222.
16 Quoted in Penelope Green. “Mary Catherine Bateson Dies at 81; Anthropologist
on Lives of Women.” The New York Times, January 14, 2021. https://www.nytimes.
com/2021/01/14/books/mary-catherine-bateson-dead.html.

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 21
which might seem alien to the mission of design, is in fact
at its core. After all, identifying a problem means nothing
other than “knowing what distinguishes an observed con-
dition from a desired condition.”
17
The point is not to ‘fix’
disillusionment, but to understand its origin and the way
it affects beliefs and behaviour. To do so, we must place
ourselves in the middle, looking at how designers have to
negotiate between management and execution, technics
and humanities, autonomy and dependence, power and
subjugation, bureaucracy and innovation, things and self.
***
What does the chaos surrounding the magic circle of
design look like? Being unable to generalise, as chaos is
always unique, I can only describe my own: a draconian
series of InDesign paragraph styles, a lost Indexhibit site,
a logo commissioned on Fiverr for a laugh, an absent-
minded visit to the Dutch Design Week, a 404 error on a
wrong jQuery URL in a static webpage, a bunch of riso-
print zines, a student’s expiring visa, a weak eduroam
WiFi access point, a crowdfunded exhibition, a poster
about the Anthropocene depicting mushrooms and bac-
teria, a Linmon-Lerberg IKEA desk travelling from one
rented room to another, an unpaid internship report, a
video essay featuring a North-American female voice-
over, an Instagram ad followed by a @dank.lloyd.wright
meme, some dusty mammoth Taschen volumes left at
my dad’s place, variable fonts, walking tote bags, people
dressed like posters, hand-made protest signs, post-its, a
dub DJ-set, Cinema 4D free assets, a Twitter hot take on
the new CIA brand, a bachelor thesis on transhumanism,
an urgent email from an obnoxious client, an alignment
error on a 1200 print-run, two herniated discs, a MacBook
Pro with Touch Bar, a pair of Lidl flip-flops, an expired
17 Rittel and Webber, op. cit., p. 159.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 22
Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, the daily advice of
Stefan Sagmeister, a coffee-stained funding application,
the e-flux spinner pattern, a witty rip-off of the MAGA
hat, 10-page portfolios (10mb max), a Unity-based explor-
atory “videogame,” a Marcel Breuer tubular chair (tried
once in a corporate office), this very Markdown file edited
in dark mode.
Someone who is familiar with design in the Global
North (and probably elsewhere too) might have some of
these items in their personal design starter pack. “Starter
pack” is the name of a meme in which the defining fea-
tures of a certain profession, subculture or fandom are
displayed against a white background.
18
They can be items,
tools, books or even habits. Often, clothes and accessories
are included, showing that much of our professional iden-
tity inevitably conforms to a certain stereotype and signals
it. Many different starter packs for the designer category
exist: “the graphic design student” starter pack, the “pre-
tentious designer” one, the “pissing off a graphic designer”
version… Their implicit message being that there is no fun-
damental difference between tools, devices, literature or
accessories. Everything is an appendix of identity, some-
thing that contributes to a sense of belonging, and in some
lucky cases, to the accumulation of prestige. The starter
pack meme highlights something else as well, namely that
identity formation combines consumption with profes-
sional production. Or even that profession is, at least in
part, a form of consumption.
19
A chaotic assemblage of
designerly stuff floating on a white canvas is supposed to
alchemically generate personal character and personalised
meaning. Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink speak of “an
aesthetic ambiance around your personality, filled with
seductive ideas, things and experiences.”
20
But this form of
18 See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/starter-packs.
19 I expand on this point in chapter 5.
20 Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink. Made in China, Designed in California,
Criticised in Europe: Design Manifesto. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2020.

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 23
Found image. Source unknown.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 24
aesthetic identification is fragile. Another recent memetic
formula reads: “designer is not a personality.” There is a
growing feeling that both profession and consumption are
insufficient means to build a solid, stable identity.
If we look specifically at graphic design, a dense, com-
plex starter pack is the one built over three years in the
Tumblr blog Critical Graphic Design.
21
There, one can scroll
through a plethora of obscure inside jokes (some already
outdated as the blog shut down in 2015), an obsession with
avantgarde designers who are also cultural producers,
especially from the Netherlands, the UK and the US (such
as Experimental Jetset, Zak Keys, Michael Bierut), the par-
ody of “criticality” as an attitude to display, some modi-
fied screenshots of the Photoshop interface, non-existing
hyperstitional theory books.
22
Also noticeable is the mech-
anism of self-canonisation typical of small scenes, a fixa-
tion on ivy-league design schools such Yale (but pictures
of Yale forklifts are shown instead), an ironic indulgence
in amateur design, a sensibility towards precarity and the
hardships of the job market, a few rants on the hypocrisy
of political design, an acute awareness of consumerism
and profession as two intersecting domains (“Everything
is stuff,” a book by Metahaven along with a Nike pair of
sneakers or a Guy Fawkes mask). Finally, some traces of
disillusion (“roses are red violets are blue please please
don’t study graphic design”).
Design critic Francisco Laranjo lamented the lack of
coherence of the blog, but it was exactly its schizophrenic
Originally, the subtitle of the book was “Amsterdam Design Manifesto”, an apt
choice that situates the specific design chaos the authors describe. Having lived in
the Netherlands for several years, I get their perspective. This is why their books
will appear frequently in the following pages. But, whereas Gerritzen and Lovink
focus mainly on the contemporary state of design, I concentrate on the state of
designers, who are the first to be redesigned by it.
21 https://criticalgraphicdesign.tumblr.com.
22 Hyperstition is a term coined by writer and philosopher Nick Land. A portmanteau
of the words “hyper” and “superstition,” it suggests that ideas can be pushed into
the cultural arena where they reinforce themselves, functioning as memetic self-
fulfilling prophecies. See Delphi Carstens. “Hyperstition.” 0rphan Drift Archive
(blog), 2010. https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition/.

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 25
polyvocality that gave Critical Graphic Design its edge.
23

Critique is no less messy than affirmation. Furthermore,
what the anonymous group behind the blog was suggesting,
already more than eight years ago, is that next to the visible
lifestyle and professional items of design personality, there
is a hidden starter pack,
24
one made of silent, sometimes
unconscious factors: nightmarish bureaucratic proce-
dures, financial troubles, rich families, gender biases, shitty
clients, unpaid internships, dynamics of micro or mac-
ro-celebrity, generous funding or lack thereof, networks
of friends, circles of gossip and so on. These threaten or
sustain the project of doing projects: the professional life
project of becoming a cultivated designer, a cultural pro-
fessional, and more crucially, of remaining one.
A more recent meme could have easily been featured on
Critical Graphic Design. Here, someone brags about her
achievements: “My husband got a promotion, I’m pregnant
and we just bought our first house.” Unlike the accomplished
high-school friend, the meme protagonist is busy joining
vector points in Adobe Illustrator, an infamously tedious
process that disgracefully hasn’t been automated yet. There
is much to unpack in this low-resolution image. First, a tra-
ditional idea of success and the good life (only the SUV is
missing). Then, a vivid expression of personal disorientation
and self-doubt. The meme also speaks of the trivialisation
of skills and the drabness of the design profession, which
is, for the most part, littered with repetitive tasks.
Finally, it seems to suggest that the exchange is hap-
pening between two women. This is no coincidence. For
women it is structurally more difficult to get to the top as
a designer and reach a position that is either authorial or
23 Francisco Laranjo. “Critical Graphic Design: Critical of What?” Design Observer,
April 16, 2014. http://designobserver.com/feature/critical-graphic-design-critical-of-
wh at/3 8416.
24 The hidden starter pack refers to the notion of hidden curriculum theorised by,
among others, John Dewey, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire. See https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Hidden_curriculum.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 26
GRMMXI (2014).
Source: https://grmmxi.fi/post/75583597164.

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 27
authoritative.
25
Women are more likely to be stuck with
the tiny, menial aspects of the job. After all, one tactic to
protect oneself from the chaos of life is to narrow one’s
project down, to make it as small as the distance between
two zoomed-in vector points. The ‘tiny’ design project,
with its controllable Bézier curves, can act as shelter from
the life project, which often seems chaotic and meaning-
less – quite the opposite of the baby-boomer family image
painted by the meme’s accomplished friend.
***
Italian cultural critic Tommaso Labranca once listed two
opposite artificial hells of art and design practitioners. On
the one hand, the aseptic horror of the white cube; on the
other hand, “the nightmare of chaos experienced in the
always temporary and shaky dwellings of the artistic under-
world.”
26
In 2018, Airbnb launched a series of design talks
entitled When Chaos Is Your Creative Director.
27
The choice
of topic makes a lot of sense for a company which deals with
people dressing up their room and apartments, often small
and Escheresque, into pleasant, generic habitats for tourists
and business visitors alike.
28
The people at Airbnb explain:
“[…] while the fog of chaos leaves some of us frozen, there
are rare talents who can see clearly enough to activate and
create.” That’s the hope: to be one of the lucky few who not
only builds order, but protects it from seeping chaos.
They insist: “Because chaos is inevitable. Because
we live in a world of political unrest, health crises, and
25 Ruber Pater reports that while most graphic design students are women, the
designers who run studios are predominantly male. Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took
Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021, p. 294.
26 Tommaso Labranca. Vraghinaroda: Sopravvivendo a hipster situazionisti,
santexuperine scalze e mistificatori deleuziani. Milano: 20090, 2019, p. 84.
27 https://airbnb.design/designed-chaos/ and https://airbnb.design/seasontwo/.
28 Journalist Kyle Chayka dubbed this aesthetic style “airspace.” See “How Silicon
Valley Helps Spread the Same Sterile Aesthetic Across the World.” The Verge,
August 3, 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-
global-minimalism-startup-gentrification.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 28
questionable ethical tech (sic ), and design plays a criti -
cal role in addressing these global challenges.” Even a
behemoth company can’t avoid admitting the inevitabil-
ity of chaos, this blob-like material which is at the same
time sublimely large and mundanely tiny, an agent whose
indifference resists most organising efforts. Chaos pre-
cedes design and operates inside it: it is the manifesta-
tion of the Real beyond the designerly illusion of a stable
and durable order. Given the chaotic qualities of design,
one could appreciate the improvisational, almost absurd-
ist illustration of designing provided by Enzo Mari, a leg-
endary Italian designer who, growing up in the rubble of
World War II, was first a vocal design utopianist, then a
disillusioned realist, and finally a sort of Great Hater of
the design world:
We all design, every day, when we are forced
to make our own decisions, even the seemingly
trivial ones. For example, having to cook and
finding in the fridge only a cup of yogurt and
two onions.
29
One way to look at design is by the capacity of its action,
that is, the order it imposes. But design is also, more sim-
ply and fundamentally, yogurt and onions – what we are
left with, the mess we’re in.
29 Enzo Mari. 25 modi per piantare un chiodo: Sessant’anni di idee e progetti per
difendere un sogno. Milano: Mondadori, 2011, p. 5.

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@dank.lloyd.wright (2022).

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 30
Found image. Source unknown.

PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 32
Chapter 1.
In the Middle

STARTER PACK STARTER PACK 33
“And just as it is only the burning awareness
of what we cannot be that guarantees the
truth of what we are, so it is only the lucid vi-
sion of what we cannot, or can not, do that
gives consistency to our actions.”
– Giorgio Agamben, 2011
30
“To reach this goal – to feel what we know and
know what we feel – is one of the tasks of our
generation.”
– László Moholy-Nagy, 1947
31
A TERRIBLE LIFE A TERRIBLE LIFE
DECISIONDECISION
The state of design in 2023. Gone are the days of the Apple
craze, of design as a positive force of change and eco-
nomic growth, a golden age in which not only design-
ers but also managers and politicians would jump on the
smooth and colourful bandwagon of design. The period
ranging from the mid-80s to the late 2000s was a promis-
ing one: design went hand in hand with creativity, which
wasn’t just a skill or a quality, but a full sociopolitical proj-
ect, that of individual autonomy and cheerful reinvention,
freedom of choice, agile making and breaking, self-de-
sign. During this time, management guru Tom Peters’s
conviction that “design is everything, it’s how you live
in the world” became the default, the same Tom Peters
who imagined a “world where the timid goal of ‘improve-
ment’ (and the tendency to tinker) has given way to… an
unabashed commitment to destruction.”
32
30 Giorgio Agamben. Nudities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, p. 45.
31 László Moholy-Nagy. Vision in Motion. Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947, p. 11.
32 2015 McKinsey interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3i7x54mOyo. Tom
Peters. Re-Imagine! London: DK, 2006, p. 31.

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 34
Today, things are different. Creativity turned out to be
not so emancipating: after the crisis of 2007 and 2008, we
dwell in the debris of ‘creative destruction.’ What is con-
stantly reinvented has no right to stability. A newer new is
always impending. In fact, some time ago another keyword
replaced design: innovation , a term which is itself now
under scrutiny. Apple releases are still spectacular events,
but the messianic aura around them has evaporated. The
design field is still expanding, but it does so less boastfully
than before. While change advances undaunted, a stand-
still is in place, an atmosphere of suspicion permeates the
room. Needless to say, design is still employed to increase
use value and exchange value (especially the latter), but
there is a growing feeling that it has lost its transforma-
tive power. Or that design is not in control of this power.
Or even that this power has always been out of control; as
such, it is not power at all.
The “design culture turn” has run its course.
33
Design
is not a buzzword anymore and today, more than ever, is
ambiguously polarised. In this conjuncture, it is designers
themselves, especially the young and not-so-young ones,
34

as well as those who inhabit the peripheries of the design
citadels, who are starting to question the value and impact
of such practice and its position within power structures.
In a way, it is the very idea of design as an abstract and
autonomous entity that is put into question: there is no
Design, but designed artefacts, systems and processes,
both material and immaterial; there are multiple influ
-
encing forces at play, and, in the middle of it all, there are
33 Guy Julier identifies a turn in design culture taking place between the ’80s and the
2000s. This turn is linked to a new social and economic arrangement generated by
neoliberal policies. Economies of Design. Los Angeles: Sage, 2017, p. 14.
34 Perhaps, especially not-so-young ones: “The disgruntlement seems to go up
the longer someone has been in the field: The more seasoned and experienced
a UX person is, the more likely they are to be asking whether realizing user-
centered values is even possible under capitalism.” Jesse Garrett. “Ux Design Is
More Successful Than Ever, but Its Leaders Are Losing Hope. Here’s Why.” Fast
Company, June 3, 2021. https://www.fastcompany.com/90642462/ux-design-is-more-
successful-than-ever-but-its-leaders-are-losing-hope.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 35
designers, stuck between the grand project of modernity
and the ‘smol’ tactics of everyday life.
While ‘the power of design’ mantra is ecumenically reit-
erated during conferences, the daily life of most designers
is mundane, structured around those “trivial purposes”
that the First Things First manifesto already lamented
in 1964.
35
The cult of design heroes survives, but a sense
of bitterness pervades the crowd, as the kind of hagiog-
raphic praise and unanimous approval that makes a hero
doesn’t match the times. Design heroes, even those who
are alive and well, are the vestiges of a dying religion. It’s
a post-heroic age. Of course, a lot of work is yet to be done
to eradicate the double myth of design as a force of good
and the designer as the hero who governs it, but the sen-
timent is clear.
Let’s zoom in on this sentiment. Can the field’s ‘sad pas-
sions’ be revealing of something we don’t fully comprehend?
According to cultural theorist Raymond Williams, “one gen-
eration may train its successor, with reasonable success, in
the social character or the general cultural pattern, but the
new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which
will not appear to have come ‘from’ anywhere.”
36
What does
it mean to inhabit design’s current structure of feeling, its
Stimmung? Can a sentiment not just be the object of analy-
sis but also its medium, its propeller? Neither a theoretical
inquiry, nor a critique, a how-to manual or an activist pam-
phlet, this book is a passionate diagnosis. Much of it delib-
erately insists on sense, feeling, perception. This is because
perceptions matter as much as knowledge, and emotion as
much as reason, or to put it another way, reason is one of
the many forms that emotion takes. We now know that “the
designer’s own mindset/posture [is] an essential component
of the design process”
37
and, if we are to trust László Moho-
35 Ken Garland. “First Things First: A Manifesto,” 1964.
36 Raymond Williams. The Long Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 1965, p. 65.
37 Terry Irwin, Gideon Kossoff, and Cameron Tonkinwise. “Transition Design
Provocation.” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 3–11. https://doi.

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 36
Found image. Source unknown.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 37
Found image. Source unknown.

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 38
ly-Nagy, we must see designing not as a profession, but as
an attitude.
38
Today, design is an attitude that wants to be
considered a profession, but this attitude is perturbed by
individual and social turmoil.
Constant redesign can be exhausting. Like in the Gart-
ner Hype Cycle, after a “peak of inflated expectations,”
we reach a “trough of disillusionment.”
39
The signs pop up
in unexpected places: design is often the butt of the joke.
Some designers are doubtful and disoriented. Others are
anaesthetised and disappointed. Some of them are plain
angry and resentful. Disillusionment is palpable. How
many disillusioned designers are there? What’s the exact
percentage of chagrin in the design field? Clearly, there is
no objective way to measure this. What is certain is that the
“slope of enlightenment” is not in sight. Some designers
get stuck: they feel unable to produce meaning with the
instruments provided by the their field. “The truth is we
are the most iconic, lazy, useful idiots of our era.” This is
how designer Baptiste Fluzin commented the call to arms
to counter the rise of Donald Trump.
40
All in all, it might
be a good time: perhaps designers are suddenly realising
that their relationship with their discipline has always been
a form of Stockholm syndrome.
Luckily for us, disillusion is not just disillusionment, a
passive feeling of dismay and disappointment. It is also
disillusioning, the active lifting of illusions, an engagement
with reality without at least some of the old veils. Thus,
disillusion is a pendulum oscillating between lucidity and
dismay. Who is more prone to this sentiment? Design dis-
illusion is the ‘feel’ of those who have access neither to the
reassurance of the centre nor to the effervescence of the
org/10.1080/14487136.2015.1085688.
38 Moholy-Nagy, op. cit, p. 42.
39 Marcus Blosch and Jackie Fenn. “Understanding Gartner’s Hype Cycles.” Gartner,
August 20, 2018. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767/understanding-
gartner-s-hype-cycles.
40 Baptiste Fluzin. “Designers, Designers, Designers.” Tumblr (blog), October 11,
2016. https://bfluzin.tumblr.com/post/152990139318.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 39
margin, those who feel stuck in some sort of pseudo-cul-
tural, semi-professional suburbia. Those who can’t seem to
attune themselves to design’s display of good sentiments
and prescription of appropriate behaviours. Despite run-
ning the risk of generating even more of it, one needs to
think with disillusion to measure the space that separates
expectations from reality.
Where is such disillusion expressed and how can it be
probed? For obvious reasons, design pessimism mostly
manifests informally, in ephemeral chats and conversa-
tions, in memes and tweets, often deleted shortly after.
While it is becoming a genre in itself, the public anti-de-
sign critical outburst is still an exception. If we turn our
gaze from the official disquisitions of museums, maga-
zines and galleries which acrobatically rip design apart
while reassembling it, to the oral environment of social
media, we witness an outpouring of doubts, reality checks
and self-deprecating humour. Just innocuous jokes, one
might say. But what if we take those jokes seriously? A
popular design publication suggested that jokes could
bring down governments.
41
More humbly, I believe they
could disclose something worthy of our attention. Let’s
look at some of them.
According to a series of memes, graphic design is: no
longer my passion / my burden / my prison. A Twitter user
admits: “Every day I think about what a terrible life deci-
sion being a designer has been.” Another one rebukes:
“design is so unimportant in the grand scheme of things
and I’m sick of seeing people kid themselves into thinking
their contributions as a designer are some form of visual
activism.” On a wall, painted red, we find the statement
“design ruined my life,” while a sticker on a trash can yells
in caps: “graphic design is shit / coding is shit / all I want is
revenge.”
42
Facetiousness, for sure. Designers’ humour, no
41 Metahaven. Can Jokes Bring down Governments? Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014.
42 To be fair, there are also positive expressions, such as “Every day I remind myself
of how lucky I am that I get paid for drawing rectangles.”

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 40
doubt. Nothing other than understatement and self-dep-
recation as a bonding mechanism. After all, that’s what
social media are for. More rigorous sources would surely
reassure us. Among them, are a few surveys on designers’
conditions. Lucienne Roberts, Rebecca Wright and Jessie
Price, editors, together with social scientist Nikandre Kop-
cke, of the book Graphic Designers Surveyed report that
“[a]lthough 83% of respondents said they would recom-
mend a career in graphic design, only 55% of respondents
expressed satisfaction with their career – and 23% were
actively dissatisfied.”
43
Stefanie Posavec, who designed the
book, concludes that “[…] while designers are an indepen-
dent, opinionated (and, dare I say it, mouthy) bunch when
it comes to how we feel about our practice and our chosen
field, this strong will doesn’t always translate into higher
wages or shorter hours.”
44
From Flavia Lunardi’s 2018 survey on Italian graphic
design studios we learn that although 86.9% of the respon-
dents don’t want to change job, 71% of them are not appeased
by the recognition of the graphic designer’s role in Italy.
45
In
this case, like in those of the UK and US, it seems that the
majority like their job and yet they are unhappy with it. Is this
an instance of what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism?”
The theorist used the term to refer to a situation in which
“the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually
makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation
for which a person or a people risks striving […].”
46
The object/
scene being, in this situation, a designer’s career.
According to the design census of 2019 carried out
by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (9,429 partic-
ipants), one out of three designers is dissatisfied, and 7% of
43 Lucienne Roberts, Rebecca Wright, and Jessie Price, eds. Graphic Designers
Surveyed. London: GraphicDesign&, 2015, pp. 456. The survey spans the UK
and US. In the overall sample, 85% of the respondents were under 40 and
predominantly white, pp. 50-51.
44 Ibidem, p.18.
45 Flavia Lunardi. “Grafica Italia 2018.” ISIA Urbino, 2018.
46 Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 2.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 41
them are ready to call it quits. And this does not take into
account the self-selecting bias of a professional association
which plausibly includes practitioners who have obtained
a certain degree of stability or success in their practice.
What would be the dissatisfaction rate if designers at large
were considered? Moreover, those surveys implicitly ask
for a sort of definitive assessment of oneself, and there-
fore the respondent might be cautious when it comes to
negative self-evaluation.
THE BIG THE BIG
SPLITSPLIT
Is this anything new? US sociologist C. Wright Mills diag-
nosed an uneasiness with the role of the designer already
in the late 1950s. He highlighted two trends: first, the
importance that distribution was gaining over production,
thus that of status over subsistence; second, the subordi-
nation of activities to capitalism and nationalism. This is
the nexus where designers operate:
Designers work at the intersection of these
trends; their problems are among the key prob-
lems of the overdeveloped society. It is their
dual investment in them that explains the big
split among designers and their frequent guilt;
the enriched muddle of ideals they variously
profess and the insecurity they often feel about
the practice of their craft; their often great dis-
gust and their crippling frustration.
47
According to Mills, the designer is a “man in the middle”
who cannot fully understand their position without con-
sidering the cultural and economic conjuncture they’re
47 C. Wright Mills. “Man in the Middle: The Designer.” In Power, Politics and People,
edited by Irving L. Horowitz, London: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 374. This
was part of Mills’ talk at the 8th International Design Conference of Aspen in
1958. The same conference where, almost twenty years later, Saul Bass asked
students “why do we have to assess capitalism? We’re just trying to stage a design
conference.” See Alice Twemlow. “‘A Guaranteed Communications Failure:’
Consensus Meets Conflict at the International Design Conference in Aspen, 1970.”
In Aspen Complex, edited by Martin Beck. London: Sternberg Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 42
I’m too sad to tell you, a mixed media artwork created by
conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader between 1970 and 1971.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 43
Bumper sticker by Freelance Studio, who found the original
image on Twitter.

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 44
in. One suspects that his words caused some stir. Design-
ers are not used to seeing themselves in the middle: they
place themselves at the top of cultural and decision-mak-
ing processes. They portray themselves as in charge of the
plan. But then, they are frustrated by the realisation that
the plan and the design are two very different things.
48

Mills’s diagnosis, however, might not fully apply today.
Whereas in the past the designer’s crippling frustration
derived from the awareness of being an “organization
man,” a cog in the cultural and economic machine, now,
given the abundance of designers, the frustration has
more to do with being a cog outside the machine, that is,
being less and less able to shape its workings.
49
After all,
Mills was speaking to a crowd of prominent representa-
tives of the field many of whom, despite the “Aspen-style”
informality,
50
were firmly embedded in the industrial and
corporate world.
Mills explained that White Collar, one of his most popu -
lar books, was “about the new little man in the big world of
the 20
th
century […] for, in truth, who is not a little man?”
Here, I propose to focus on the ‘interscalar’ gap between
the personal tiny and the structural huge, to connect the
vector points of individual life to the grand issues rooted
in modernity and its crisis. The ’60s white-collar worker
was beginning to experience what would become the
default torments of the no-collar professional worker, a
category that the designer centrally represents: The “new
little man […] seems to have no firm roots, no sure loyalties
to sustain his life and give it a center […] Perhaps because
he does not know where he is going, he is in a frantic
hurry; perhaps because he does not know what frightens
him, he is paralyzed with fear.”
48 See chapter 4.
49 William H. Whyte. The Organization Man. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
50 International Design Conference in Aspen: The First Decade, 1961. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=8MxCGKicSfg.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 45
This is how the magazine Industrial Design reviewed
Mills’s talk:
Generally when a speaker addresses members
of a profession not his own, he tells them what
they want to hear. He can do it obviously, by tell-
ing them how good they are; or subtly, by tell-
ing them how bad they are, then making it all
right at the end by exhorting them to be bet
-
ter. In either case, since he tells them only what
they tell each other, he contributes only the illu-
sion of a fresh perspective. An exception is this
paper read to the Design Conference in Aspen
this summer by sociologist and author (The
Power Elite) C. Wright Mills. Neither lullaby nor
mock attack, it is a hard analysis of the designer
in our society.
51
Neither lullaby nor mock attack. We can take this as a
methodological principle to carry out an inquiry that is
self-conscious of its own participation in the design dis-
course, a discourse which mostly welcomes what it can
digest in utilitarian terms, be it criticism or praise.
Since Aspen, design’s identity crisis has only worsened.
In the ’70s, Tomás Maldonado detected a dimming of the
“designerly hope,” brought about by a youthful nihilism
that was leading to a pre-emptive renunciation of action.
Maldonado was thankful to the youth “for waking us up
from our drowsiness and reminding us without euphemism
that ours is not an Arcadian age, but an agonizingly con-
vulsive one.”
52
And yet, he firmly believed in the necessity
of hope, hence his essay on the topic. Although I agree with
Maldonado, this book takes a different approach: it exam-
ines hopelessness in itself, resisting the urge of immedi -
ately rejecting it, for it is in hopelessness that hope sprouts.
51 In Javier A. Treviño. “C. Wright Mills as Designer: Personal Practice and Two
Public Talks.” The American Sociologist 45, no. 4 (December 1, 2014): 335–60.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-014-9196-y.
52 Maldonado, La speranza progettuale. op. cit. , p. 10.

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 46
“Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given
hope,” wrote Walter Benjamin.
53
THE EVERYDAY THE EVERYDAY
DESIGNERDESIGNER
Maldonado had the young in mind, Mills the professional
class. What’s the subject of this book, then? The designer
in the real world, I’m tempted to say. Still, what reality?
The question is not an easy one and has serious theoreti-
cal implications. “When I talk about reality – wrote Ursula
Franklin – I’m not trying to be a philosopher. I think of
reality as the experience of ordinary people in everyday
life.”
54
With this in mind, who do we call a designer? What
particularities do we include in this definition? The more
we categorise, the more our categories quiver. Shall we con-
sider designers only people who studied design? What do
we do, then, with those self-taught practitioners who have
achieved professional recognition? How could we leave out
the “legions of designers who work in-house for companies
or as freelancers?”
55
Shall we break down designers by the
type of service they provide? That won’t work. Graphic
designers craft products, product designers conceive ser-
vices, service designers do performances, performers stra-
tegically call their activity choreographic design, strategic
designers print posters and fliers, etc. Specialisms have
detached themselves from products to become a sort of
shared attitude and a common set of cultural and method-
ological references. More than with the things that they do,
designers identify with the sensitivity they adopt when they
do those very things. To a certain extent, the contemporary
designer is a designer without qualities.
Radical openness is our last resort: trust the person who
calls themselves a designer to be one. Trust the designer
who makes some of her income designing logos for friends,
53 Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926. Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
2004.
54 Ursula M. Franklin. The Real World of Technology. Toronto: Anansi, 1999, p. 27.
55 Julier, op. cit., p. 5.

IN THE MIDDLE IN THE MIDDLE 47
Found image, photoshopped. In the original picture, taken
in London, the sticker reads “Growth is shit, jobs are shit,
all I want is revenge.”

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 48
as well as the design auteur who sell his designs as col -
lectible NFTs to pay rent; trust the business student who
started calling themselves a designer after having learned
about design thinking, trust the art director and the ser-
vice designer, trust the critical designer, the user-centred
designer, the design catalyst, the metadesigner, trust the
designer who makes ‘actually existing design.’ This stance
goes against notions of quality, excellence and even exper-
tise, notions that have been mobilised by the field to acquire
status. We need to relativise these notions to be able to see
how, and if, they still lead to status. Excellence has always
been the rhetorical instrument of a winning elite. But in
order to understand elitist aspirations, we need to picture
a kind of designer who is not so much part of an elite. This
designer is not taken into account by design literature,
which mostly focuses on promoting and strengthening the
field. I will call this figure the everyday designer . While this
kind of practitioner might have cultural and political aspi-
rations, a good portion of their time is spent in mundane
tasks. Perhaps the everyday designer has just launched a
small boutique studio and struggles to find the clients who
could appreciate their research capabilities. Perhaps they
just had a kid. The everyday designer might be simply a stu-
dent, taking an undergraduate or master’s degree, either a
technical or more artistic one. Or a recent graduate, trying
to practice what has been preached to them. They might be
sitting in a small agency thinking up a campaign to enrich
the portfolio of a small bank. The everyday designer is a
Photoshop whiz, he’s toying with Figma or Sketchup, she’s
banging her head against CSS rules or the settings of a 3D
printer. The everyday designer is the designer caught up
in daily, menial tasks beyond creation, while daydreaming
about their role and career. They’re good enough designers
– yet they might even be contemplating the idea of quitting.
What the everyday designer is not: the design star at
the top of their field, the universally recognised expert,

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My search must needs be long. Meantime the flood
Will cast thee up thy food, . .
And in the Chambers of the Rock by night,
Take thou thy safe abode,
No prowling beast to harm thee, or affright,
Can enter there; but wrap thyself with care
From the foul Bird obscene that thirsts for blood;
For in such caverns doth the Bat delight
To have its haunts. Do thou with stone and shout,
Ere thou liest down at evening, scare them out,
And in this robe of mine involve thy feet.
Duly commend us both to Heaven in prayer,
Be of good heart, and let thy sleep be sweet.
9.
So saying, he put back his arm, and gave
The cloth which girt his loins, and prest her hand
With fervent love, then down the sloping sand
Advanced into the sea: the coming Wave,
Which knew Kehama’s Curse, before his way
Started, and on he went as on dry land,
And still around his path the waters parted.
She stands upon the shore, where sea-weeds play,
Lashing her polish’d ankles, and the spray
Which off her Father, like a rainbow, fled,
Falls on her like a shower; there Kailyal stands,
And sees the billows rise above his head.
She, at the startling sight, forgot the power
The Curse had given him, and held forth her hands
Imploringly, . . . her voice was on the wind,
And the deaf Ocean o’er Ladurlad clos’d.
Soon she recall’d his destiny to mind,
And, shaking off that natural fear, compos’d
Her soul with prayer, to wait the event resign’d.
10.

Alone, upon the solitary strand,
The lovely one is left; behold her go,
Pacing with patient footsteps, to and fro,
Along the bending sand.
Save her, ye Gods! from Evil Powers, and here
From man she need not fear;
For never Traveller comes near
These awful ruins of the days of yore,
Nor fisher’s bark, nor venturous mariner,
Approach the sacred shore.
All day she walk’d the beach, at night she sought
The Chamber of the Rock; with stone and shout
Assail’d the Bats obscene, and scar’d them out;
Then in her Father’s robe involv’d her feet,
And wrapt her mantle round to guard her head,
And laid her down: the rock was Kailyal’s bed,
Her chamber-lamps were in the starry sky,
The winds and waters were her lullaby.
11.
Be of good heart, and let thy sleep be sweet,
Ladurlad said, . . Alas! that cannot be
To one whose days are days of misery.
How often did she stretch her hands to greet
Ereenia, rescued in the dreams of night!
How oft amid the vision of delight,
Fear in her heart all is not as it seems;
Then from unsettled slumber start, and hear
The Winds that moan above, the Waves below!
Thou hast been call’d, O Sleep! the friend of Woe,
But ’tis the happy who have call’d thee so.
12.
Another day, another night are gone,
A second passes, and a third wanes on.
So long she paced the shore,

So often on the beach she took her stand,
That the wild Sea-Birds knew her, and no more
Fled, when she past beside them on the strand.
Bright shine the golden summits in the light
Of the noon-sun, and lovelier far by night
Their moonlight glories o’er the sea they shed:
Fair is the dark-green deep; by night and day
Unvex’d with storms, the peaceful billows play,
As when they clos’d upon Ladurlad’s head:
The firmament above is bright and clear;
The sea-fowl, lords of water, air, and land,
Joyous alike upon the wing appear,
Or when they ride the waves, or walk the sand;
Beauty and light and joy are every-where;
There is no sadness and no sorrow here,
Save what that single human breast contains,
But oh! what hopes, and fears, and pains are there!
13.
Seven miserable days the expectant Maid,
From earliest dawn till evening, watch’d the shore;
Hope left her then; and in her heart she said,
Never shall I behold my Father more!

XVI.
THE ANCIENT SEPULCHRES.
1.
When the broad Ocean on Ladurlad’s head
Had clos’d and arch’d him o’er,
With steady tread he held his way
Adown the sloping shore.
The dark-green waves, with emerald hue,
Imbue the beams of day,
And on the wrinkled sand below,
Rolling their mazy network to and fro,
Light shadows shift and play.
The hungry Shark, at scent of prey,
Toward Ladurlad darted;
Beholding then that human form erect,
How like a God the depths he trod,
Appall’d the monster started,
And in his fear departed.
Onward Ladurlad went with heart elate,
And now hath reach’d the Ancient City’s gate.
2.
Wondering, he stood awhile to gaze
Upon the works of elder days.
The brazen portals open stood,
Even as the fearful multitude
Had left them, when they fled
Before the rising flood.
High over-head, sublime,

The mighty gateway’s storied roof was spread,
Dwarfing the puny piles of younger time.
With the deeds of days of yore
That ample roof was sculptur’d o’er,
And many a godlike form there met his eye,
And many an emblem dark of mystery.
Through these wide portals oft had Baly rode
Triumphant from his proud abode,
When, in his greatness, he bestrode
The Aullay, hugest of four-footed kind,
The Aullay-Horse, that in his force,
With elephantine trunk, could bind
And lift the elephant, and on the wind
Whirl him away, with sway and swing,
Even like a pebble from the practis’d sling.
3.
Those streets which never, since the days of yore,
By human footstep had been visited;
Those streets; which never more
A human foot shall tread,
Ladurlad trod. In sun-light, and sea-green,
The thousand palaces were seen
Of that proud city, whose superb abodes
Seem’d rear’d by Giants for the immortal Gods.
How silent and how beautiful they stand,
Like things of Nature! the eternal rocks
Themselves not firmer. Neither hath the sand
Drifted within their gates, and choak’d their doors,
Nor slime defil’d their pavements and their floors.
Did then the Ocean wage
His war for love and envy, not in rage,
O thou fair City, that he spares thee thus?
Art thou Varounin’s capital and court,
Where all the Sea-Gods for delight resort,
A place too godlike to be held by us,

The poor degenerate children of the Earth?
So thought Ladurlad, as he look’d around,
Weening to hear the sound
Of Mermaid’s shell, and song
Of choral throng from some imperial hall,
Wherein the Immortal Powers, at festival,
Their high carousals keep.
But all is silence dread,
Silence profound and dead,
The everlasting stillness of the Deep.
4.
Through many a solitary street,
And silent market-place, and lonely square,
Arm’d with the mighty Curse, behold him fare.
And now his feet attain that royal fane
Where Baly held of old his awful reign.
What once had been the Garden spread around,
Fair Gardens, once which wore perpetual green,
Where all sweet flowers through all the year were found,
And all fair fruits were through all seasons seen;
A place of Paradise, where each device
Of emulous Art with Nature strove to vie;
And Nature, on her part,
Call’d forth new powers wherewith to vanquish Art.
The Swerga-God himself, with envious eye,
Survey’d those peerless gardens in their prime;
Nor ever did the Lord of Light,
Who circles Earth and Heaven upon his way,
Behold from eldest time a goodlier sight
Than were the groves which Baly, in his might,
Made for his chosen place of solace and delight.
5.
It was a Garden still beyond all price,
Even yet it was a place of Paradise;

For where the mighty Ocean could not spare,
There had he, with his own creation,
Sought to repair his work of devastation.
And here were coral bowers,
And grots of madrepores,
And banks of spunge, as soft and fair to eye
As e’er was mossy bed
Whereon the Wood Nymphs lie
With languid limbs in summer’s sultry hours.
Here, too, were living flowers
Which, like a bud compacted,
Their purple cups contracted,
And now in open blossom spread,
Stretch’d like green anthers many a seeking head.
And arborets of jointed stone were there,
And plants of fibres fine, as silkworm’s thread;
Yea, beautiful as Mermaid’s golden hair
Upon the waves dispread:
Others that, like the broad banana growing,
Rais’d their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue,
Like streamers wide out-flowing.
And whatsoe’er the depths of Ocean hide
From human eyes, Ladurlad there espied,
Trees of the deep, and shrubs and fruits and flowers,
As fair as ours,
Wherewith the Sea-Nymphs love their locks to braid,
When to their father’s hall, at festival
Repairing, they, in emulous array,
Their charms display,
To grace the banquet, and the solemn day.
6.
The golden fountains had not ceas’d to flow,
And, where they mingled with the briny Sea,
There was a sight of wonder and delight,
To see the fish, like birds in air,

Above Ladurlad flying.
Round those strange waters they repair,
Their scarlet fins outspread and plying,
They float with gentle hovering there;
And now upon those little wings,
As if to dare forbidden things,
With wilful purpose bent,
Swift as an arrow from a bow
They dash across, and to and fro,
In rapid glance, like lightning go
Through that unwonted element.
Almost in scenes so wonderous fair,
Ladurlad had forgot
The mighty cause which led him there;
His busy eye was every where,
His mind had lost all thought;
His heart, surrendered to the joys
Of sight, was happy as a boy’s.
But soon the awakening thought recurs
Of him who, in the Sepulchres,
Hopeless of human aid, in chains is laid;
And her who, on the solitary shore,
By night and day her weary watch will keep,
Till she shall see them issuing from the deep.
7.
Now hath Ladurlad reach’d the Court
Of the great Palace of the King; its floor
Was of the marble rock; and there before
The imperial door,
A mighty Image on the steps was seen,
Of stature huge, of countenance serene.
A crown and sceptre at his feet were laid;
One hand a scroll display’d,
The other pointed there, that all might see;
My name is Death, it said,

In mercy have the Gods appointed me.
Two brazen gates beneath him, night and day
Stood open; and within them you behold
Descending steps, which in the living stone
Were hewn, a spacious way
Down to the Chambers of the Kings of old.
8.
Trembling with hope, the adventurous man descended
The sea-green light of day
Not far along the vault extended;
But where the slant reflection ended,
Another light was seen
Of red and fiery hue,
That with the water blended,
And gave the secrets of the Tombs to view.
9.
Deep in the marble rock, the Hall
Of Death was hollowed out, a chamber wide,
Low-roof’d, and long; on either side,
Each in his own alcove, and on his throne,
The Kings of old were seated: in his hand
Each held the sceptre of command,
From whence, across that scene of endless night,
A carbuncle diffused its everlasting light.
10.
So well had the embalmers done their part
With spice and precious unguents, to imbue
The perfect corpse, that each had still the hue
Of living man, and every limb was still
Supple and firm and full, as when of yore
Its motion answered to the moving will.
The robes of royalty which once they wore,
Long since had mouldered off and left them bare:

Naked upon their thrones behold them there,
Statues of actual flesh, . . a fearful sight!
Their large and rayless eyes
Dimly reflecting to that gem-born light,
Glaz’d, fix’d, and meaningless, . . . yet, open wide,
Their ghastly balls belied
The mockery of life in all beside.
11.
But if, amid these Chambers drear,
Death were a sight of shuddering and of fear,
Life was a thing of stranger horror here.
For at the farther end, in yon alcove,
Where Baly should have lain, had he obey’d
Man’s common lot, behold Ereenia laid.
Strong fetters link him to the rock; his eye
Now rolls and widens, as with effort vain
He strives to break the chain,
Now seems to brood upon his misery.
Before him couch’d there lay
One of the mighty monsters of the deep,
Whom Lorrinite encountering on the way,
There station’d, his perpetual guard to keep;
In the sport of wanton power, she charm’d him there,
As if to mock the Glendoveer’s despair.
Upward his form was human, save that here
The skin was cover’d o’er with scale on scale
Compact, a panoply of natural mail.
His mouth, from ear to ear,
Weapon’d with triple teeth, extended wide,
And tusks on either side;
A double snake below, he roll’d
His supple lengths behind in many a sinuous fold.
12.

With red and kindling eye, the Beast beholds
A living man draw nigh,
And, rising on his folds,
In hungry joy awaits the expected feast,
His mouth half-open, and his teeth unsheath’d.
Then on he sprung, and in his scaly arms
Seiz’d him, and fasten’d on his neck, to suck,
With greedy lips, the warm life-blood: and sure
But for the mighty power of magic charms,
As easily as, in the blithesome hour
Of spring, a child doth crop the meadow flower,
Piecemeal those claws
Had rent their victim, and those armed jaws
Snapt him in twain. Naked Ladurlad stood,
Yet fearless and unharm’d in this dread strife,
So well Kehama’s Curse had charm’d his fated life.
13.
He too, . . . for anger, rising at the sight
Of him he sought, in such strange thrall confin’d.
With desperate courage fir’d Ladurlad’s mind, . . .
He, too, unto the fight himself addrest,
And grappling breast to breast,
With foot firm-planted stands,
And seiz’d the monster’s throat with both his hands.
Vainly, with throttling grasp, he prest
The impenetrable scales;
And lo! the guard rose up, and round his foe,
With gliding motion, wreath’d his lengthening coils,
Then tighten’d all their folds with stress and strain.
Nought would the raging Tyger’s strength avail
If once involv’d within those mighty toils;
The arm’d Rhinoceros, so clasp’d, in vain
Had trusted to his hide of rugged mail,
His bones all broken, and the breath of life

Crush’d from the lungs, in that unequal strife.
Again, and yet again, he sought to break
The impassive limbs; but when the monster found
His utmost power was vain,
A moment he relax’d in every round,
Then knit his coils again with closer strain,
And, bearing forward, forced him to the ground.
14.
Ereenia groan’d in anguish at the sight
Of this dread fight: once more the Glendoveer
Essay’d to break his bonds, and fear
For that brave spirit who had sought him here,
Stung him to wilder strugglings. From the rock
He rais’d himself half up, . . with might and main
Pluck’d at the adamantine chain;
And now, with long and unrelaxing strain,
In obstinate effort of indignant strength,
Labour’d and strove in vain;
Till his immortal sinews fail’d at length;
And yielding, with an inward groan, to fate,
Despairingly, he let himself again
Fall prostrate on his prison-bed of stone,
Body and chain alike with lifeless weight.
15.
Struggling they lay in mortal fray
All day, while day was in our upper sphere,
For light of day,
And natural darkness never entered here;
All night, with unabated might,
They waged the unremitting fight.
A second day, a second night,
With furious will they wrestled still.
The third came on, the fourth is gone;
Another comes, another goes,

And yet no respite, no repose;
But day and night, and night and day,
Involv’d in mortal strife they lay;
Six days and nights have past away,
And still they wage, with mutual rage,
The unremitting fray.
With mutual rage their war they wage,
But not with mutual will;
For when the seventh morning came,
The monster’s worn and wearied frame
In this strange contest fails;
And weaker, weaker, every hour
He yields beneath strong Nature’s power,
For now the Curse prevails.
16.
Sometimes the Beast sprung up to bear
His foe aloft; and, trusting there
To shake him from his hold,
Relax’d the rings that wreath’d him round;
But on his throat Ladurlad hung,
And weigh’d him to the ground;
And if they sink, or if they float,
Alike with stubborn clasp he clung,
Tenacious of his grasp;
For well he knew with what a power,
Exempt from Nature’s laws,
The Curse had arm’d him for this hour;
And in the monster’s gasping jaws,
And in his hollow eye,
Well could Ladurlad now descry
The certain signs of victory.
17.
And now the guard no more can keep
His painful watch; his eyes, opprest,

Are fainting for their natural sleep;
His living flesh and blood must rest,
The Beast must sleep or die.
Then he, full faint and languidly,
Unwreathes his rings and strives to fly,
And still retreating, slowly trails
His stiff and heavy length of scales.
But that unweariable foe,
With will relentless, follows still;
No breathing time, no pause of fight
He gives, but presses on his flight;
Along the vaulted chambers, and the ascent
Up to the emerald-tinted light of day,
He harasses his way,
Till lifeless, underneath his grasp,
The huge Sea-Monster lay.
18.
That obstinate work is done! Ladurlad cried,
One labour yet remains!
And thoughtfully he eyed
Ereenia’s ponderous chains;
And with vain effort, half-despairing, tried
The rivets deep in-driven. Instinctively,
As if in search of aid, he look’d around:
Oh, then, how gladly, in the near alcove,
Fallen on the ground its lifeless Lord beside,
The crescent scymitar he spied,
Whose cloudy blade, with potent spells imbued,
Had lain so many an age unhurt in solitude.
19.
Joyfully springing there
He seiz’d the weapon, and with eager stroke
Hew’d at the chain; the force was dealt in vain,
For not as if through yielding air

Past the descending scymitar,
Its deaden’d way the heavy water broke;
Yet it bit deep. Again, with both his hands,
He wields the blade, and dealt a surer blow.
The baser metal yields
To that fine edge, and lo! the Glendoveer
Rises and snaps the half-sever’d links, and stands
Freed from his broken bands.

XVII.
BALY.
1.
This is the appointed night,
The night of joy and consecrated mirth,
When, from his judgement-seat in Padalon,
By Yamen’s throne,
Baly goes forth, that he may walk the Earth
Unseen, and hear his name
Still hymn’d and honour’d by the grateful voice
Of humankind, and in his fame rejoice.
Therefore from door to door, and street to street,
With willing feet,
Shaking their firebrands, the glad children run;
Baly! great Baly! they acclaim,
Where’er they run they bear the mighty name;
Where’er they meet,
Baly! great Baly! still their choral tongues repeat.
Therefore at every door the votive flame
Through pendant lanthorns sheds its painted light,
And rockets hissing upward through the sky,
Fall like a shower of stars
From Heaven’s black canopy.
Therefore, on yonder mountain’s templed height,
The brazen cauldron blazes through the night.
Huge as a Ship that travels the main sea
Is that capacious brass; its wick as tall
As is the mast of some great admiral.
Ten thousand votaries bring

Camphor and ghee to feed the sacred flame;
And while, through regions round, the nations see
Its fiery pillar curling high in heaven,
Baly! great Baly! they exclaim,
For ever hallowed be his blessed name!
Honour and praise to him for ever more be given!
2.
Why art not thou among the festive throng,
Baly, O Mighty One! to hear thy fame?
Still as of yore, with pageantry and song
The glowing streets along,
They celebrate thy name;
Baly! great Baly! still
The grateful habitants of Earth acclaim,
Baly! great Baly! still
The ringing walls and echoing towers proclaim.
From yonder mountain the portentous flame
Still blazes to the nations as before;
All things appear to human eyes the same,
As perfect as of yore;
To human eyes, . . but how unlike to thine!
Thine which were wont to see
The Company divine,
That with their presence came to honour thee!
For all the blessed ones of mortal birth
Who have been cloth’d with immortality,
From the eight corners of the Earth,
From the Seven Worlds assembling, all
Wont to attend thy solemn festival.
Then did thine eyes behold
The wide air peopled with that glorious train,
Now may’st thou seek the blessed ones in vain,
For Earth and Air are now beneath the Rajah’s reign.
3.

Therefore the Mighty One hath walk’d the Earth
In sorrow and in solitude to-night.
The sound of human mirth
To him is no delight;
He turns away from that ungrateful sight,
Hallowed not now by visitants divine,
And there he bends his melancholy way
Where, in yon full-orb’d Moon’s refulgent light,
The Golden Towers of his old City shine
Above the silver sea. The mighty Chief
There bent his way in grief,
As if sad thoughts indulged would work their own relief.
4.
There he beholds upon the sand
A lovely Maiden in the moonlight stand.
The land-breeze lifts her locks of jet,
The waves around her polish’d ancles play,
Her bosom with the salt sea-spray is wet;
Her arms are crost, unconsciously, to fold
That bosom from the cold,
While statue-like she seems her watch to keep,
Gazing intently on the restless deep.
5.
Seven miserable days had Kailyal there,
From earliest dawn till evening, watch’d the deep;
Six nights within the chamber of the rock,
Had laid her down, and found in prayer
That comfort which she sought in vain from sleep.
But when the seventh night came,
Never should she behold her Father more,
The wretched Maiden said in her despair;
Yet would not quit the shore,
Nor turn her eyes one moment from the sea:
Never before

Had Kailyal watch’d it so impatiently,
Never so eagerly had hop’d before,
As now when she believ’d, and said, all hope was o’er.
6.
Beholding her, how beautiful she stood,
In that wild solitude,
Baly from his invisibility
Had issued then, to know her cause of woe;
But that, in the air beside her, he espied
Two Powers of Evil for her hurt allied,
Foul Arvalan and dreadful Lorrinite.
The Mighty One they could not see,
And marking with what demon-like delight
They kept their innocent prey in sight,
He waits, expecting what the end may be.
7.
She starts; for lo! where floating many a rood,
A Monster, hugest of the Ocean brood,
Weltering and lifeless, drifts toward the shore.
Backward she starts in fear before the flood,
And, when the waves retreat,
They leave their hideous burthen at her feet.
8.
She ventures to approach with timid tread,
She starts, and half draws back in fear,
Then stops, and stretches on her head,
To see if that huge beast indeed be dead.
Now growing bold, the Maid advances near,
Even to the margin of the ocean-flood.
Rightly she reads her Father’s victory,
And lifts her joyous hands, exultingly,
To Heaven in gratitude.
Then spreading them toward the Sea,

While pious tears bedim her streaming eyes,
Come! come! my Father, come to me!
Ereenia, come! she cries.
Lo! from the opening deep they rise,
And to Ladurlad’s arms the happy Kailyal flies.
9.
She turn’d from him, to meet, with beating heart,
The Glendoveer’s embrace.
Now turn to me, for mine thou art!
Foul Arvalan exdaim’d; his loathsome face
Came forth, and from the air,
In fleshly form, he burst.
Always in horror and despair,
Had Kailyal seen that form and face accurst,
But yet so sharp a pang had ne’er
Shot with a thrill like death through all her frame,
As now when on her hour of joy the Spectre came.
10.
Vain is resistance now,
The fiendish laugh of Lorrinite is heard;
And, at her dreadful word,
The Asuras once again appear,
And seize Ladurlad and the Glendoveer.
11.
Hold your accursed hands!
A Voice exclaim’d, whose dread commands
Were fear’d through all the vaults of Padalon;
And there among them, in the midnight air,
The presence of the mighty Baly shone.
He, making manifest his mightiness,
Put forth on every side an hundred arms,
And seiz’d the Sorceress; maugre all her charms,
Her and her fiendish ministers he caught

With force as uncontroulable as fate;
And that unhappy Soul, to whom
The Almighty Rajah’s power availeth not
Living to avert, nor dead to mitigate
His righteous doom.
12.
Help, help, Kehama! Father, help! he cried;
But Baly tarried not to abide
That mightier Power; with irresistible feet
He stampt and cleft the Earth; it opened wide,
And gave him way to his own judgement-seat.
Down, like a plummet, to the World below
He sunk, and bore his prey
To righteous punishment, and endless woe.

XVIII.
KEHAMA’S DESCENT.
1.
The Earth, by Baly’s feet divided,
Clos’d o’er his way as to the judgement-seat
He plunged and bore his prey.
Scarce had the shock subsided,
When, darting from the Swerga’s heavenly heights,
Kehama, like a thunderbolt, alights.
In wrath he came, a bickering flame
Flash’d from his eyes which made the moonlight dim,
And passion forcing way from every limb,
Like furnace-smoke, with terrors wrapt him round.
Furious he smote the ground;
Earth trembled underneath the dreadful stroke,
Again in sunder riven;
He hurl’d in rage his whirling weapon down.
But lo! the fiery sheckra to his feet
Return’d, as if by equal force re-driven,
And from the abyss the voice of Baly came:
Not yet, O Rajah, hast thou won
The realms of Padalon!
Earth and the Swerga are thine own,
But, till Kehama shall subdue the throne
Of Hell, in torments Yamen holds his son.
2.
Fool that he is! . . in torments let him lie!
Kehama, wrathful at his son, replied.

But what am I
That thou should’st brave me? . . kindling in his pride
The dreadful Rajah cried.
Ho! Yamen! hear me. God of Padalon,
Prepare thy throne,
And let the Amreeta cup
Be ready for my lips, when I anon
Triumphantly shall take my seat thereon,
And plant upon thy neck my royal feet.
3.
In voice like thunder thus the Rajah cried,
Impending o’er the abyss, with menacing hand
Put forth, as in the action of command,
And eyes that darted their red anger down.
Then drawing back he let the earth subside,
And, as his wrath relax’d, survey’d,
Thoughtful and silently, the mortal Maid.
Her eye the while was on the farthest sky,
Where up the etherial height
Ereenia rose and past away from sight.
Never had she so joyfully
Beheld the coming of the Glendoveer,
Dear as he was and he deserv’d to be,
As now she saw him rise and disappear.
Come now what will, within her heart said she,
For thou art safe, and what have I to fear?
4.
Meantime the Almighty Rajah, late
In power and majesty and wrath array’d,
Had laid his terrors by
And gaz’d upon the Maid.
Pride could not quit his eye,
Nor that remorseless nature from his front
Depart; yet whoso had beheld him then

Had felt some admiration mix’d with dread,
And might have said
That sure he seem’d to be the King of Men;
Less than the greatest that he could not be,
Who carried in his port such might and majesty.
5.
In fear no longer for the Glendoveer,
Now toward the Rajah Kailyal turn’d her eyes
As if to ask what doom awaited her.
But then surprise,
Even as with fascination, held them there,
So strange a thing it seem’d to see the change
Of purport in that all-commanding brow,
That thoughtfully was bent upon her now.
Wondering she gaz’d, the while her Father’s eye
Was fix’d upon Kehama haughtily;
It spake defiance to him, high disdain,
Stern patience, unsubduable by pain,
And pride triumphant over agony.
6.
Ladurlad, said the Rajah, thou and I
Alike have done the work of Destiny,
Unknowing each to what the impulse tended;
But now that over Earth and Heaven my reign
Is stablish’d, and the ways of Fate are plain
Before me, here our enmity is ended.
I take away thy Curse. . . As thus he said,
The fire which in Ladurlad’s heart and brain
Was burning, fled, and left him free from pain.
So rapidly his torments were departed,
That at the sudden ease he started,
As with a shock, and to his head
His hands up-fled,

As if he felt through every failing limb
The power and sense of life forsaking him.
7.
Then turning to the Maid, the Rajah cried,
O Virgin, above all of mortal birth
Favour’d alike in beauty and in worth,
And in the glories of thy destiny,
Now let thy happy heart exult with pride,
For Fate hath chosen thee
To be Kehama’s bride,
To be the Queen of Heaven and Earth,
And of whatever Worlds beside
Infinity may hide . . . For I can see
The writing which, at thy nativity,
All-knowing Nature wrought upon thy brain,
In branching veins, which to the gifted eye
Map out the mazes of futurity.
There is it written, Maid, that thou and I,
Alone of human kind a deathless pair,
Are doom’d to share
The Amreeta-drink divine
Of immortality. Come, Maiden mine!
High-fated One, ascend the subject sky,
And by Kehama’s side
Sit on the Swerga throne, his equal bride.
8.
Oh never, . . never . . Father! Kailyal cried;
It is not as he saith, . . it cannot be!
I! . . I, his bride!
Nature is never false; he wrongeth her!
My heart belies such lines of destiny.
There is no other true interpreter!
9.

At that reply Kehama’s darkening brow
Bewray’d the anger which he yet supprest.
Counsel thy daughter; tell her thou art now
Free from thy Curse, he said, and bid her bow
In thankfulness to Fate’s benign behest.
Bid her her stubborn will restrain,
For Destiny at last must be obey’d,
And tell her, while obedience is delay’d,
Thy Curse will burn again.
10.
She needeth not my counsel, he replied,
And idly, Rajah, dost thou reason thus
Of Destiny! for though all other things
Were subject to the starry influencings,
And bow’d submissive to thy tyranny,
The virtuous heart, and resolute will are free.
Thus in their wisdom did the Gods decree
When they created man. Let come what will,
This is our rock of strength; in every ill,
Sorrow, oppression, pain and agony,
The spirit of the good is unsubdued,
And, suffer as they may, they triumph still.
11.
Obstinate fools! exclaim’d the Mighty One,
Fate and my pleasure must be done,
And ye resist in vain!
Take your fit guerdon till we meet again!
So saying, his vindictive hand he flung
Towards them, fill’d with curses; then on high
Aloft he sprung, and vanish’d through the Sky.

XIX.
MOUNT CALASAY.
1.
The Rajah, scattering curses as he rose,
Soar’d to the Swerga, and resum’d his throne.
Not for his own redoubled agony,
Which now through heart and brain,
With renovated pain,
Rush’d to its seat, Ladurlad breathes that groan,
That groan is for his child; he groan’d to see
The lovely one defil’d with leprosy,
Which, as the enemy vindictive fled,
O’er all her frame with quick contagion spread.
She, wondering at events so passing strange,
And fill’d with hope and fear,
And joy to see the Tyrant disappear,
And glad expectance of her Glendoveer,
Perceiv’d not in herself the hideous change.
His burning pain, she thought, had forced the groan
Her father breath’d; his agonies alone
Were present to her mind; she claspt his knees,
Wept for his Curse, and did not feel her own.
2.
Nor when she saw her plague, did her good heart,
True to itself, even for a moment fail.
Ha, Rajah! with disdainful smile she cries,
Mighty and wise and wicked as thou art,
Still thy blind vengeance acts a friendly part.

Shall I not thank thee for this scurf and scale
Of dire deformity, whose loathsomeness,
Surer than panoply of strongest mail,
Arms me against all foes? Oh, better so,
Better such foul disgrace,
Than that this innocent face
Should tempt thy wooing! That I need not dread;
Nor ever impious foe
Will offer outrage now, nor farther woe
Will beauty draw on my unhappy head;
Safe through the unholy world may Kailyal go.
3.
Her face in virtuous pride
Was lifted to the skies,
As him and his poor vengeance she defied;
But earthward, when she ceas’d, she turn’d her eyes,
As if she sought to hide
The tear which in her own despite would rise.
Did then the thought of her own Glendoveer
Call forth that natural tear?
Was it a woman’s fear,
A thought of earthly love, which troubled her?
Like yon thin cloud amid the moonlight sky
That flits before the wind
And leaves no trace behind,
The womanly pang past over Kailyal’s mind.
This is a loathsome sight to human eye,
Half-shrinking at herself, the Maiden thought,
Will it be so to him? Oh surely not!
The immortal Powers, who see
Through the poor wrappings of mortality,
Behold the soul, the beautiful soul, within,
Exempt from age and wasting malady,
And undeform’d, while pure and free from sin.
This is a loathsome sight to human eye,

But not to eyes divine,
Ereenia, Son of Heaven, oh not to thine!
4.
The wrongful thought of fear, the womanly pain
Had past away, her heart was calm again.
She rais’d her head, expecting now to see
The Glendoveer appear;
Where hath he fled, quoth she,
That he should tarry now? Oh had she known
Whither the adventurous Son of Heaven was flown,
Strong as her spirit was, it had not borne
The awful thought, nor dar’d to hope for his return.
5.
For he in search of Seeva’s throne was gone,
To tell his tale of wrong;
In search of Seeva’s own abode
The daring one began his heavenly road.
O wild emprize! above the farthest skies
He hop’d to rise!
Him who is thron’d beyond the reach of thought,
The Alone, the Inaccessible, he sought.
O wild emprize! for when in days of yore,
For proud pre-eminence of power,
Brama and Veeshnoo, wild with rage, contended,
And Seeva, in his might,
Their dread contention ended;
Before their sight
In form a fiery column did he tower,
Whose head above the highest height extended,
Whose base below the deepest depth descended.
Downward, its depth to sound,
Veeshnoo a thousand years explor’d
The fathomless profound,
And yet no base he found:

Upward, to reach its head,
Ten myriad years the aspiring Brama soar’d,
And still, as up he fled,
Above him still the Immeasurable spread.
The rivals own’d their lord,
And trembled and ador’d.
How shall the Glendoveer attain
What Brama and what Veeshnoo sought in vain?
6.
Ne’er did such thought of lofty daring enter
Celestial Spirit’s mind. O wild adventure
That throne to find, for he must leave behind
This World, that in the centre,
Within its salt-sea girdle, lies confin’d;
Yea the Seven Earths that, each with its own ocean,
Ring clasping ring, compose the mighty round.
What power of motion,
In less than endless years shall bear him there,
Along the limitless extent,
To the utmost bound of the remotest spheres?
What strength of wing
Suffice to pierce the Golden Firmament
That closes all within?
Yet he hath past the measureless extent,
And pierced the Golden Firmament;
For Faith hath given him power, and Space and Time
Vanish before that energy sublime.
Nor doth Eternal Night,
And outer Darkness, check his resolute flight;
By strong desire through all he makes his way,
Till Seeva’s Seat appears, . . behold Mount Calasay!
7.
Behold the Silver Mountain! round about
Seven ladders stand, so high, the aching eye,

Seeking their tops in vain amid the sky,
Might deem they led from earth to highest heaven.
Ages would pass away,
And Worlds with age decay,
Ere one whose patient feet from ring to ring
Must win their upward way,
Could reach the summit of Mount Calasay.
But that strong power that nerv’d his wing,
That all-surmounting will,
Intensity of faith and holiest love,
Sustain’d Ereenia still,
And he hath gain’d the plain, the sanctuary above.
8.
Lo, there the Silver Bell,
That, self-sustain’d, hangs buoyant in the air!
Lo! the broad Table there, too bright
For mortal sight,
From whose four sides the bordering gems unite
Their harmonizing rays,
In one mid fount of many-colour’d light.
The stream of splendour, flashing as it flows,
Plays round, and feeds the stem of yon celestial Rose.
Where is the Sage whose wisdom can declare
The hidden things of that mysterious flower,
That flower which serves all mysteries to bear?
The sacred triangle is there,
Holding the Emblem which no tongue may tell.
Is this the Heaven of Heavens, where Seeva’s self doth dwell?
9.
Here first the Glendoveer
Felt his wing flag, and paus’d upon his flight.
Was it that fear came over him, when here
He saw the imagin’d throne appear?
Not so, for his immortal sight

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What Design Cant Do Essays On Design And Disillusion Silvio Lorusso

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