Sickness and Unreason

It was interesting but rather deflating to follow the recent 'hostage crisis' unfold. The Iranians are are intensely nationalistic people -whence the constant and pathetic reference to seven thousand years of civilisation. On the other hand, the so-called newspapers here were full of "bring our boys home" and , just a week before that, we're not a nation of apologisers (this, with regard the slave trade).

And all the time this jingoism, this tribalism, was beginning to grate on my nerves. The media circus in full swing ..now that they're selling their stories it transpires that the concerns on this front were only that it was the Iranians who were pulling the strings behind the images.

It is never asked what our boys are doing there, whether the death of other people's children* means anything..shock and awe and daisy-cutters bring Infinite Justice. Gandhi was right on one thing at least: western civilisation: a very good idea. No clearer indication could there be that the Enlightenment aspirations of universality and reason are utterly meaningless and superficial. Unless an idea is incarnated it remains superficial, incidental to one's whole outlook. No fire burns in self-consciousness, in a life that is rooted to its own image.

For the moderns it would seem there are only two options: identify with the cold state (Simone Weil) and her narratives or return to the pre-political, the warmth of community, of animal bonds (as Becket says in a fantastic line). Blood and soil and the idolatry of History and Life.

*
Their deaths among the uncountable
masses of dead might be real to those who
don't dare imagine death.
Might burn through the veil that blinds
those who do not imagine the burned bodies
of other people's children.
.....

Just feeling human
the way a cloud's a cloud..
Human, free for the day from roles assigned,
each with its emblem
cluttering the right hand..
Human, a kind of element, a fire...
.........

The same war continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives.
Our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the grey filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,
delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of the birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifest designs
fairer than the spiders most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, without regret..

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines 'mercy',
'lovingkindness'; we have beloved one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good-

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is swelling..as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm
of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

----Deise Levertov.


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