darkness

Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History – Wislawa Szymborska

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There are dogs and dogs. I was among the chosen.
I had good papers and wolf’s blood in my veins.
I lived upon the heights inhaling the odors of views:
meadows in sunlight, spruces after rain,
and clumps of earth beneath the snow.

I had a decent home and people on call,
I was fed, washed, groomed,
and taken for lovely strolls.
Respectfully, though, and comme il faut.
They all knew full well whose dog I was.

Any lousy mutt can have a master.
Take care, though — beware comparisons.
My master was a breed apart.
He had a splendid herd that trailed his every step
and fixed its eyes on him in fearful awe.

For me they always had smiles,
with envy poorly hidden.
Since only I had the right
to greet him with nimble leaps,
only I could say good-bye by worrying his trousers with my teeth.
Only I was permitted
to receive scratching and stroking
with my head laid in his lap.
Only I could feign sleep
while he bent over me to whisper something.

He raged at others often, loudly.
He snarled, barked,
raced from wall to wall.
I suspect he liked only me
and nobody else, ever.

I also had responsibilities: waiting, trusting.
Since he would turn up briefly, and then vanish.
What kept him down there in the lowlands, I don’t know.
I guessed, though, it must be pressing business,
at least as pressing
as my battle with the cats
and everything that moves for no good reason.

There’s fate and fate. Mine changed abruptly.
One spring came
and he wasn’t there.
All hell broke loose at home.
Suitcases, chests, trunks crammed into cars.
The wheels squealed tearing downhill
and fell silent round the bend.

On the terrace scraps and tatters flamed,
yellow shirts, armbands with black emblems
and lots and lots of battered cartons
with little banners tumbling out.

I tossed and turned in this whirlwind,
more amazed than peeved.
I felt unfriendly glances on my fur.
As if I were a dog without a master,
some pushy stray
chased downstairs with a broom.

Someone tore my silver-trimmed collar off,
someone kicked my bowl, empty for days.
Then someone else, driving away,
leaned out from the car
and shot me twice.

He couldn’t even shoot straight,
since I died for a long time, in pain,
to the buzz of impertinent flies.
I, the dog of my master.

just one more war (Saturday reprise)

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I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, “after just one more war” it will dawn, the new era of love: but first everybody who is hated must be eliminated. For hate, you see, is the mother of their kind of love.

Unfortunately the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of man in fighting the fiction which it calls “the enemy.” For man is concrete and alive, but “the enemy” is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real men in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love. It refuses, a priori, to love. It is dedicated not to concrete relations of man with man, but only to abstractions about politics, economics, psychology, and even, sometimes, religion.

– Thomas Merton

Appalling Barbarity

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Thus we became highly disciplined, organized, and rational on one side, but the other side remained a suppressed primitive, cut off from education and civilization.

This explains our many relapses into the most appalling barbarity, and it also explains the really terrible fact that, the higher we climb the mountain of scientific and technical achievement, the more dangerous and diabolical becomes the misuse of our inventions. Think of the great triumph of the human mind, the power to fly: we have accomplished the age-old dream of humanity! And think of the bombing raids of modern warfare! Is this what civilization means? Is it not rather a convincing demonstration of the fact that, when our mind went up to conquer the skies, our other man, that suppressed barbarous individual, went down to hell? Certainly our civilization can be proud of its achievements, yet we have to be ashamed of ourselves.
– Carl Jung, from Psychology and the East

I Love The Dark Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke

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I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a grave
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Marginalia by W.H Auden

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The gregarious
And mild-tempered never know
Each other by name:
Creatures who make friends are shy
And liable to anger.
*
Unable to see
A neighbor to frown at,
Eutroplus beat his wife.
(after K. Lorenz)
*
A dead man
Who never caused others to die
Seldom rates a statue.
*
Small tyrants, threatened by big,
Sincerely believe
They love Liberty.
*
Tyrants may get killed,
But their hangmen usually
Die in their beds.
*
Patriots? Little boys
Obsessed by bigness,
Big pricks, big money, big bangs.
*
He praised his God
For the expertise
Of his torturer and his chef.
*
Reluctant at first
To break his sworn promise
Of Safe Conduct, after
Consulting his confessor,
In good spirits
He signed a death-warrant.
*
“Be godly,” he told his flock,
“Bloody and extreme
Like the Holy Ghost.”
*
After the massacre,
They pacified their conscience
By telling jokes.
*
When their Infidel
Paymaster fell in arrears,
The mercenaries
Recalled their unstained childhoods
In devout Christian homes.
*
With silver mines,
Recruiting grounds,
A general of real genius,
He thought himself invulnerable:
In one battle
He lost all three.
*
The last king
Of a fallen dynasty
Is never well spoken of.
*
Intelligent, rich,
Humane, the young man dreamed of
Posthumous glory
As connoisseur and patron
Of Scholarship and the Arts.
An age bent on war,
The ambitions of his king,
Decreed otherwise:
He was to be remembered
As a destroyer of towns.
*
Born to flirt and write light verses,
He died bravely
By the headsman’s axe.
*
Into the prosperous quiet
Between two wars
Came Anopheles.
*
The Queen fled, leaving
Books behind her
That shocked the pious usurper.
*
Assembling
With ceremonial pomp,
The Imperial Diet
Cravely debated
Legislation
It had no power to reject.
*
Victorious over
The foreign tyrant,
The patriots retained
His emergency
Police regulations,
Devised to suppress them.
*
In States unable
To alleviate Distress,
Discontent is hanged.
*
In semi-literate countries
Demagogues pay
Court to teen-agers.
*
To maintain a stud
Of polo ponies he now
Was too stout to ride,
He slapped taxes on windows,
Hearth-stones and door-steps and wives.
*
He walked like someone
Who’d never had to
Open a door for himself.
*
Abandoning his wives,
He fled with their jewels
And two hundred dogs.
*
Providentially
Right for once in his lifetime
(His reasons were wrong),
The old sod was permitted
To save civilization.
*
Who died in Nineteen-Sixty-Five
More worthy of honors
Than Lark, the cow
Who gave to mankind
One hundred and fifteen thousand
Litres of milk?
*
When we do evil,
We and our victims
Are equally bewildered.
* *
The decent, probably,
Outnumber the swine,
But few can inherit
The genes, or procure
Both the money and time,
To join the civilized.

Snake

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By D. H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
            before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
            the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
             a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
            of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
            and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
            that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
            himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
            in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

To say that the world…

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“To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?

And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.

It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is nothing but a more or less evil dream,” – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.