Abba Anthony said, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.'”
A time is coming
darkness
Atomic Dawn by Gary Snyder
The day I first climbed Mt. St. Helens was August 13, 1945.
Spirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6 and the second dropped on Nagasaki August 9, photographs didn’t appear in the Portland Oregonian until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of the paper pinned up: photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted saying “nothing will grow there again for seventy years.” The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin moccasins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.”
Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History – Wislawa Szymborska
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)
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
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
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.
Fear
For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.
– C.G. Jung
Marginalia by W.H Auden
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.
naming God
When we give a thing a name we imagine we have got hold of it. We imagine that we have got hold of being. Perhaps we should do better not to flatter ourselves too soon that we can name God.
–Gregory of Nyssa
things that ignore us
We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us. Their presence awakens silence in us. They refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment. – Andrew Harvey
Edge of Atlantic 